Bonding

The WIP schedule your surety actually reads

A bonding company underwrites your ability to finish every job you're currently carrying, not just the one you want bonded next. The WIP schedule — contract value, cost to date, percent complete, earned revenue, and over/(under) billing, for every open job — is how they see that whole book at once. A clean, current schedule doesn't just report your position; underwriters read the consistency of the document itself as a signal of how carefully you run the business.

The ratios that decide bondability

Beyond the schedule itself, sureties translate it into a handful of ratios. Total over-billing measured against your equity is one — a small ratio reads as disciplined billing, a large one reads as a contractor financing operations on customer money rather than completed work. Backlog measured against equity is another — too much uncompleted contract value relative to your financial base signals you may be carrying more work than you can finish well. Both are watched at the portfolio level and at the level of any single job that looks concentrated or unusual on its own.

Profit fade: the signal that matters most

If there's one number that gets bonds cut, it's a shrinking profit margin on a job from one period to the next — profit fade. Sureties don't expect every job to be perfectly on-margin; they expect a written explanation when one isn't. The problem is that catching fade requires comparing this month's schedule against last month's, and a contractor rebuilding WIP from scratch each month in a spreadsheet rarely keeps disciplined snapshots to compare against — so the fade goes unnoticed until it's large enough for the surety to ask about it first.

What "surety-ready" actually means

In practice it means three things: the schedule is current (built from this month's actual costs and billings, not a stale estimate), it's correctly special-cased (loss jobs show the full loss now, not a smoothed fraction of it), and it's presented the way the reviewer already expects to read it. A schedule that's accurate but idiosyncratically formatted still costs you time in back-and-forth with the underwriter — matching the standard is part of making the number itself easy to trust.

Want to check where a single job stands before you build the full package? Try the free WIP calculator — it computes percent complete, earned revenue, and over/(under) billing on your device, nothing sent anywhere.