You finished the job. You did good work. Now you're waiting on a check that should have arrived two weeks ago.
Sound familiar? You're not alone. The average contractor waits 45 or more days to get paid on completed work. Some wait 60–90 days. That's your materials, your labor, your profit sitting in someone else's account while you're already buying supplies for the next job.
The fix isn't complicated. It's a handful of habits that, once they're locked in, mostly run on autopilot.
1. Invoice the Day the Job Wraps — Not Friday
This one sounds obvious. It isn't practiced nearly enough.
Contractors who invoice within 24 hours of job completion get paid an average of 14 days sooner than those who wait a week or more. Fourteen days. On a $20,000 remodel, that's real cash flow sitting idle for two extra weeks because you got busy and kept meaning to send the invoice.
Set a rule: before you leave the driveway, the invoice goes out. If your tool makes it faster than five minutes on your phone, there's no excuse.
2. Take a Deposit Before You Buy a Single Piece of Material
For any job where you're buying materials upfront, ask for a 25–50% deposit before work begins — this is standard industry practice. You are not being pushy. You're running a business, not a bank.
A deposit does three things for you:
- It covers materials so you're not floating the job on your credit card
- It filters out tire-kickers who aren't serious
- A customer who has already put money in is far more likely to be ready when work starts — fewer last-minute reschedules, fewer "can we push it a week?"
Put the deposit amount and due date on the estimate itself, before the contract is signed. No surprises.
3. Make It Dead Simple to Pay You
If your customer wants to pay online and you're only set up for checks, you're adding friction to the process. And friction means delays.
Every invoice you send should have a payment link — one tap, card or bank transfer, done. Most late payments are forgetfulness, not malice. The harder it is to pay, the longer they'll put it off. The easier it is, the faster money hits your account.
If someone has to find their checkbook, find a stamp, and remember to mail it — that invoice is going to sit on the kitchen counter for two weeks.
4. Use Milestone Billing on Bigger Jobs
Waiting until a $30,000 bathroom remodel is fully done to send the first invoice is a cash flow disaster. Break bigger jobs into milestones — the structure keeps cash flowing throughout the project instead of floating the entire job on your credit card or line of credit.
A simple three-part structure works for most residential remodels:
- 30% deposit at contract signing
- 40% at rough-in / mid-point milestone
- 30% at substantial completion
Write the payment schedule into the estimate before the job starts. When a customer knows what to expect — and has already agreed to it in writing — they don't push back at invoice time.
The Tool Problem
Here's where it breaks down for most solo GCs: the process above requires you to actually do it. And if sending an invoice means opening a laptop, finding a template, filling in line items, and emailing a PDF — you won't do it from the driveway. You'll wait until you get home. Then you'll wait until after dinner. Then it's Friday.
The solution is having a tool that makes all of this fast enough to do on your phone, on site, in under five minutes. Estimates that convert to invoices in one tap. Deposits collected with a payment link. Milestone billing set up before work starts so invoices go out automatically at each stage.
That's exactly what Chisel is built for — estimates, invoices, Stripe payments, milestones, digital agreements, and 2-way SMS, all at $29/month flat. No tiers, no per-user fees.
