You buy the materials. You pay the subs. You eat the rot behind the shower wall and the outlet they asked you to move. Then you wait on a draw. A general contractor can be profitable on every job and still run out of money, because in this business the cash goes out weeks before it comes in and nobody writes down the parts that go out quietly. From $27/month.
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, somewhere between 25% and 43% of construction establishments are still operating ten years after they open, depending on which year's cohort you look at, and between 33% and 60% make it to five. BLS doesn't say why the rest close, and neither will we.
What we can say is what a draw schedule does to a business. You order materials in week one. You pay framing in week two and electrical in week three. The first draw gets requested in week four, approved in week five if the inspection passed, and lands in week six. For five weeks you have funded somebody else's kitchen out of your own account, and you've done it while absorbing every "could you just also…" that nobody priced.
That's not a bookkeeping problem, it's the shape of the business. The jobs can all be profitable on the spreadsheet while the company is one slow draw away from not making payroll. This page is about the two leaks that cause it: scope you did and never billed, and money that arrives too long after it left.
None of these feel like a big deal in the moment. That's exactly why they're the problem — each one is a small interest-free loan to your client that you'll never ask to be repaid.
| What they ask | What it actually costs you | Usually billed? | Days added |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Can you move that outlet?" | Electrician return trip, patch, sand, paint | Rarely | 1–2 |
| "Upgrade the trim while you're at it" | Material difference plus extra labor | Sometimes, at cost | 1 |
| "We found rot behind the shower" | Unplanned materials, labor, possible re-inspection | Should be. Often only partly | 2–4 |
| "Actually, we want the other tile" | Restock fee, reorder lead time, re-cut | Partially | 3–7 |
| "Could you haul the old furniture too?" | Dump fees and truck time | Almost never | ½ |
| "Can your guy look at the garage door?" | Entirely outside the contract | No | ½ |
| "One more coat in the hallway" | Labor and material | Rarely | ½ |
Add the right-hand column and you've lost the better part of a working week. Add the middle one and you've funded a few thousand dollars of someone else's house. Both came out of the same place: your cash, and your schedule, neither of which had room. Every one of these could have been a two-minute written approval with a price attached — and the reason it wasn't is that stopping to write it felt ruder than paying for it yourself.
Every other walkthrough on this site follows a job, a season or a customer. This one is an argument — the one at the end of a remodel, which is where a general contracting business actually loses its money. Each exchange is annotated with where it should have been settled.
They're holding the contract and they're right about what it says. You're holding ten weeks of memory. Only one of those is a document, and this conversation is already lost.
Week 10 · The final invoiceAnd here you have to reconstruct, out loud, from recollection, under pressure, in front of someone who is now certain they're being overcharged. You will forget two of them and you will get one date wrong, and both will be used against the rest.
What a change order log would have replacedThey asked in the hallway while you were on the phone. You said "yeah, no problem." It cost an electrician's return trip and a patch-and-paint. In their memory it was a favor, because it was offered like one.
Two minutes to price it. Zero minutes spent.Genuinely not their fault and genuinely not yours. You photographed it, you fixed it, you mentioned it in passing, and you ate most of it to protect the relationship. Now it reads as padding, because the only evidence that it happened is a photo on your phone with no number attached.
Photo on the job record + written change orderThis one was entirely their change. There was a restock fee and a week of reorder. You told them it would cost extra. They remember you saying it might. "Might" is doing a lot of work in this conversation and it is not doing it for you.
E-signature turns "might" into a date and a numberPure favor, half a day, nowhere in the contract. You're not going to charge for it now and you probably shouldn't have then. But it's in the $8,400 somewhere, which means the favor is currently costing you credibility on top of the half day.
Bill it at zero, in writing — the goodwill only counts if they see itThe hardest part of this page: they're probably not lying. Six verbal yeses across ten weeks, delivered casually while they were living in a construction site, genuinely do not survive as agreements in anyone's memory. You didn't get cheated. You just never wrote it down.
Why this is a systems problem, not a people problemA change order on your phone before the work started: what it is, what it costs, how many days it adds, signed on their phone in under two minutes, with payment attached or rolled into the next draw. Six of those and week ten is a formality instead of a fight — and the $8,400 arrived weeks ago instead of being negotiated down to $3,000 now.
Written change orders · E-signature · Payment linksThe second leak isn't about scope at all. It's about the gap between the two directions cash moves.
Materials bought up front. Subs who expect to be paid on their terms, not your client's. An inspection that slipped a week and held the draw with it. Retainage sitting unpaid until a punch list gets signed off. And every unbilled change above, quietly riding along.
None of this is unusual — it's how the work is structured. The problem is that most general contractors only find out how exposed they are when something slips, and by then the options are expensive.
None of that changes what a job costs. It changes when you have the money, which is the number that actually decides whether the business is still here in year ten.
On Contractor Growth and Contractor Pro, a professional contracting website is built for you as part of the plan — not quoted separately by an agency at a few thousand dollars.
A remodel is the most expensive and most nerve-wracking thing most homeowners ever buy, and they're choosing someone to live with for three months. Your site has to do what a trade-service site doesn't: show finished projects properly, state your license and insurance, explain how your process and payment schedule work, and make it obvious you're still going to exist at the end.
On Contractor Starter at $27 you get the builder and build it yourself. On Growth and Pro we build it for you.
Obravetta isn't construction management software — see the honest limits below. It's the client-facing layer, and for a general contractor it breaks into six jobs.
Published figures, sourced below.
Two honest notes on these. The survival range is wide because it varies by cohort — businesses that opened into the 2006–08 period fared far worse than those that opened in 2014 or 2017 — and BLS reports survival, not cause, so nothing in that number tells you these businesses failed on cash flow. We've argued that separately and you should weigh it on its own merits. Five-year survival ranges from 33% to 60% on the same data. Employment was 609,100 construction managers in 2025 with about 49,700 openings projected a year, and BLS notes managers may be on call 24 hours a day to respond to project emergencies, and that their duties include selecting subcontractors, scheduling their activities and responding to work delays.
Every plan includes a 14-day free trial, month-to-month with no contract. Annual billing charges for ten months instead of twelve.
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Owner-operator. Website builder, proposals and change orders with e-signature, invoicing, payment links and review automation.
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Adds AI voice answering, a professional website built for you, and 5,000 contacts.
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Set $27 against the table higher up the page: one captured change order on one job covers a year of it. That's the honest case for this product in general contracting — it isn't that it runs your projects, it's that it stops the small leaks that don't show up until the final invoice.
For most general contractors running real projects, dedicated construction management software is the right answer and we'd rather say so plainly. Buildertrend, CoConstruct, JobTread, Procore and Contractor Foreman are built for scheduling, job costing, budgets, selections, daily logs and subcontractor management — none of which we do, and our platform comparison covers how we sit against the wider field. Obravetta is the client-facing and money-facing layer: leads, proposals, change orders, getting paid and reputation. A lot of contractors run both.
No. No critical-path scheduling, no Gantt charts, no budget-versus-actual by cost code, no daily logs, no RFIs or submittals, no selections sheets, no subcontractor portals or certificate-of-insurance tracking, and no takeoffs or estimating. That's a long list and it's the honest one — this is a mature software category and we are not in it. If project management is what you're shopping for, buy that.
Because profit is measured over a job and cash is measured over a week. You buy materials in week one and pay subs in weeks two and three, but the first draw doesn't land until week five or six, and retainage sits unpaid until a punch list is signed. Add the changes you did without billing and the business can be making money on paper the entire time it's running out of it. Shortening the gap — deposits at signature, milestone invoicing sent the day it's earned, change orders billed on approval — doesn't change job profit at all. It changes whether you can make payroll.
By making them small, fast and routine rather than rare and confrontational. If a change order takes two minutes on a phone and they sign it on theirs, it reads as organization. If it's a formal document produced for the first time in week six, it reads as a dispute. The practical trick is doing it for everything, including the ones you're not charging for — a favor billed at zero in writing is goodwill they can actually see, instead of a line they'll later assume was padding.
If there's nothing in writing, you're negotiating rather than collecting, and the honest truth is they're often not being dishonest. Six verbal agreements over ten weeks, given casually by someone living in a construction site, genuinely don't survive in memory as agreements. That's why this is a systems problem rather than a character problem. Going forward, the fix is that nothing gets built before it's written, however small and however friendly the conversation was.
Yes. Deposits can be collected at the moment of signature rather than on day one of the job, and progress invoices can go out against milestones with a payment link that settles by card or bank transfer. For a business where the money reliably leaves before it arrives, moving each payment a week earlier is worth more than it sounds, and it costs nothing to set up.
We don't handle them, and you shouldn't improvise them. Lien rights, preliminary notice requirements and deadlines are set state by state, vary a great deal, and are genuinely unforgiving — missing a deadline can forfeit your security on money you're owed. Use a specialist service or your attorney. What we can do is make sure the amount you're owed is documented and billed promptly, which is the part most disputes actually turn on.
By being the source of bad news rather than the subject of it. Schedules slip in this business — BLS lists responding to work delays as part of the job description — and the client will find out either way. A short message when a phase changes, a progress photo, and a heads-up the day a delay happens costs you minutes and buys an enormous amount of patience. Silence during a slip is what turns a delay into a complaint.
That's a large part of this trade — BLS reports 38% of construction managers are self-employed, the highest share of any trade we work with. Contractor Starter at $27 covers proposals, change orders with e-signature, invoicing and payment links, which are the pieces that protect your cash. It's a single seat and doesn't include AI voice answering or the built-for-you website; both start on Growth at $97.
Mostly on confidence rather than price. A homeowner spending six figures and living in the site for three months is buying reassurance that you'll finish and still be solvent. A proposal broken into phases with a clear payment schedule, a website that shows comparable finished projects and states your license and insurance, prompt written answers, and a body of reviews all do that work. Long sales cycles also need a pipeline, because these decisions take weeks and get lost in text threads.
The thing worth doing first is a change order template, and it's an hour. After that every change is a fill-in-the-blanks job from your phone, which is the difference between capturing them and not. Proposals, invoicing and payment links can be live the same day. The part with a real wait is 10DLC registration — the carrier approval required to send business texts in the US — which takes a few business days and applies to any platform that texts your customers.
Fourteen days is enough to build a change order template, turn on deposits at signature, and put a payment link on every invoice you send. On the next job that alone changes the week-ten conversation.
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Survival rates of construction establishments by years since opening, for annual cohorts from the years ended March 1994 onward: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics, Table 7 — NAICS 23 Construction. Ten-year survival ranges from 24.7% to 42.8% and five-year survival from 33.2% to 59.8% across cohorts; we have rounded these to 25–43% and 33–60% on the page. BLS reports survival only and does not state causes of closure. Employment, median pay, projected growth, annual openings, the 38% self-employed share, the industry breakdown, and the notes on being on call 24 hours a day, selecting and scheduling subcontractors and responding to work delays: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Construction Managers, 2025 data. Local ranking factors and the statement that more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking: Google Business Profile Help. All verified October 2026. Obravetta pricing from our own pricing page.
Nothing on this page is legal, financial, accounting or tax advice. The BLS survival figures describe how many construction establishments remained open, not why any of them closed; the cash flow argument on this page is our own reasoning and is not supported by, or attributed to, that data. Mechanics lien rights, preliminary notice requirements and filing deadlines are set at state level, vary considerably and are time-barred — consult an attorney or a specialist service, and do not rely on this page or on Obravetta, which does not manage liens, notices or waivers. Contractor licensing, bonding and insurance requirements likewise vary by state. The mid-project request table and the week-ten conversation use hypothetical figures and situations to illustrate common patterns; they are not based on any real project and are not predictions of results. Obravetta does not provide project scheduling, job costing, daily logs, submittals, selections or subcontractor management. Google does not disclose how heavily any individual ranking factor is weighted, and no platform can promise a ranking outcome. Google, Contractor Foreman, Buildertrend, CoConstruct, JobTread, Procore and any other platforms named are trademarks of their respective owners; Obravetta is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them. Figures and third-party policies change — verify current details at the sources above.