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Ninety days is the number owners quote from memory. Spend an hour and find out what yours actually is.

The working companion to Ninety Days Is Where the Slow End of the Industry Sits. The article makes the argument. This page turns it into a measurement you perform on your own book.

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How to use this page. Print it or save it as a PDF, then fill in the tables below from your own accounting system. Everything is here. There is nothing to download and no spreadsheet to open. Budget about an hour for the first pass and fifteen minutes each quarter after that.

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This page and the calculator do different jobs, so use both, and hand the right thing across. The Slow-Pay Calculator: What Slow Pay Is Costing You asks for four things: your average monthly revenue, your days to get paid, the target days you are aiming at, and optionally your line-of-credit rate. It turns the gap between those two day counts into dollars. What this page gives it is the days figure, measured off your own closed jobs instead of assumed at ninety, plus a target you can defend.

What this page does not give it is a dollar figure. The float you calculate in Step 5 is built from cost that already left your bank. The calculator's tied-up-cash figure is built from revenue and days. Those are two readings of the same money on different bases. Read them side by side, but do not add them together and do not type one into the other.

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• 📑 Jump to a section

Step 1. Pick the jobs

• [ ] Pull your last eight to twelve closed commercial jobs, meaning jobs paid in full including retainage release
• [ ] Commercial only. Do not mix in residential or direct insurance work, because they pay on a different rhythm and blending them hides both numbers
• [ ] Use jobs that closed in roughly the last twelve months, so the number reflects how your customers pay now
• [ ] Include the painful ones. Dropping the two worst jobs is a common way owners talk themselves into a number that is not true

Number of jobs in this sample:

Period the sample covers:

Pulled by:

Date pulled:

Step 2. Record five dates for each job

Five dates, from your job file and your bank deposits, not from memory.

1. Work complete. The day the last billable work was performed, not the day you closed the file in your software.