You pull your WIP schedule together every month. Costs to date, billings to date, percent complete, the numbers that tell you where every job actually stands. It's a tool built for you, to catch problems early and keep every job on track internally.
Your surety agent asks for the same document and reads it completely differently. They're not checking if a job is profitable. They're checking if your whole operation can carry the weight of everything you have going at once, this job plus every other job plus whatever you're about to bid next. Bonding capacity isn't a measure of any single project. It's a measure of your balance sheet's ability to absorb risk across your entire backlog.
That's why a contractor can walk into a bonding review feeling confident and walk out confused. The jobs are healthy. The margins are fine. But the surety isn't asking about the jobs. They're asking about working capital, net worth, and how much of your equity is already committed to work you haven't finished yet. If your WIP schedule was never built to answer that question, the numbers don't translate, even when the underlying business is sound.
There's a second layer to this that catches contractors off guard even more. Sureties don't just want current numbers. They want a pattern. A single strong quarter doesn't build trust the way three years of stable working capital growth does. If your schedule has never tracked that trend, you're walking into every bonding conversation starting from zero credibility instead of building on a track record you may have actually earned.
A contractor came to me after winning his first public project, a different world from the private jobs he'd built his track record on. The private work had been solid, margins healthy, nothing internally suggesting a problem. But a public bid comes with bonding requirements private work doesn't, and he wanted his WIP schedule ready before the surety ever reviewed it, not after.
The deadline was the real driver. He needed to get his bonding capacity in place in time to bid a second project, so he brought me on three months ahead of the bid instead of waiting until the surety was already asking questions. That's the difference between building a relationship with a CPA before you need one, and scrambling to explain your business to someone new right when a surety is asking hard questions.
- Track working capital and equity trends alongside job cost every month, not just at renewal time. A surety wants to see a pattern, not a snapshot.
- State percent complete conservatively on any job with real uncertainty. An underbid number builds more trust than an optimistic one that gets corrected later.
- Know your bonding capacity before you bid the next job, not after you've already promised it to a client. Find out where your ceiling is while you still have time to plan around it.
- Ask your surety what specific ratios they weigh most heavily. Every surety is slightly different, and knowing their priorities lets you build toward the number that actually matters to them.
Book a call with me to get your WIP schedule and bonding capacity reviewed before your next bid depends on it.