Pay-when-paid without the cash crunch

Almost every subcontract you sign is pay-when-paid, or its meaner cousin, pay-if-paid. You get paid after the GC gets paid by the owner. It's the defining cash-flow fact of the trade, and arguing about the clause rarely changes it. What you can change is how much of your own money you have visibility into, and how fast you turn work into an approved invoice.

Pay-when-paid vs. pay-if-paid

Pay-when-paid usually means timing: the GC can take a reasonable amount of time to pay you, tied to when they're paid. Pay-if-paid tries to make the owner's payment a true condition of yours — shifting the risk of the owner never paying onto you. Know which one you signed, because it changes how aggressively you should be watching a slow-paying job.

Your real AR isn't what you invoiced

The number that matters for cash isn't total billed — it's what's actually collectible, and when. A pay app you sent that hasn't been approved is not the same as one that's approved and pending payment, which isn't the same as one that's 60 days late. Lumping them together as "accounts receivable" hides the exact thing you need to manage.

SubTools breaks AR down by job and by builder, aged, so you can see which GCs are consistently slow, which jobs are quietly financing the rest of your company, and where a single late payment is about to squeeze payroll.

• Unpaid pay apps by job and by builder, aged into buckets.
• Approved-and-pending separated from sent-and-unapproved.
• A forward view of what should land each week, not just what's overdue.

Bill faster, and give them no reason to reject

The fastest way to improve cash flow under pay-when-paid isn't chasing — it's shortening the gap between doing the work and having an approved invoice. Every day a pay app sits unbilled or gets kicked back for missing backup is a day added to a cycle you don't fully control.

• Send progress and T&M invoices the day the work is done, not at month-end.
• Attach the backup — signed tickets, photos, waivers — automatically, so there's nothing to reject.
• Match the GC's required format and cost breakdown the first time.
• Let the agent send the reminder before the due date, not two weeks after.

“We stopped billing at month-end and started billing the day the phase closed. Our average days-to-cash dropped by two weeks without a single hard conversation.”

Forecast with real numbers

Once your AR reflects reality, you can forecast cash instead of guessing. You'll see the week payroll and a big material order collide, and you'll see it early enough to pull a pay app forward, lean on a specific slow GC, or arrange a short line of credit — instead of finding out on a Thursday.

You can't rewrite pay-when-paid. But you can make sure your paperwork is never the reason a payment is late, and that your cash picture is built on what's really coming in — not on hope.