Getting Paid

The Draw That Won’t Move

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

You wrote a payment schedule into the contract. Deposit at signing, a draw when the material ships, a draw at rough-in, a draw at substantial completion, retainage at the end. It is a good schedule. You have used a version of it for years.

Then the job happens.

The material ships three weeks early because the supplier had it on the floor. The general contractor is not ready for you, so the rough-in draw sits there while the delivery draw is already earned. Or it goes the other way and the equipment is six weeks out, so you are past two milestones on a schedule that still thinks the first thing that happens is a truck showing up.

Either way, the list of steps on your job screen is now telling you a story about your money that is not the story of your job.

A schedule out of order is not a cosmetic problem

It is tempting to shrug at this. The dollars are the dollars, and you know in your head what has actually been earned. But that only works while you are the one looking at it.

The person doing your billing on Thursday afternoon is reading the list top to bottom, and the list is what tells them what is next. A draw sitting three positions past where the job really is looks like a draw that has already gone by. So it does not get billed, and nobody notices until the month closes short. That is the quietest way a good job loses money, and it almost never announces itself.

It also breaks the one thing you actually want out of a job screen, which is the ability to glance at it and know where you are. If the order is wrong, you have to reconstruct the whole job in your head every time you open it. Most people stop opening it.

Why software usually gets this wrong

The software has a real problem here, and it is worth naming, because the way a tool solves it tells you what its builders think of you.

Some of those steps are settled history. A draw you already billed happened, on a date, with an invoice number attached to it. Some of them are the tool guessing. A step nobody has put a date on yet is sitting wherever the tool decided to put it, which is a guess dressed up as a fact.

Most tools handle the mix by picking one extreme. Either everything is locked, and you are stuck staring at a step in the wrong place with no way to touch it, or nothing is locked, and one wrong tap on a phone in a truck rewrites a billing history you will need to explain to somebody two years from now.

I got stuck on the first one myself, on a real job, in an early version of my own tool. A pre-ship draw was sitting in the wrong spot and there was no way for me to move it. I wrote the rule for how it should work that same night, and the build below is that rule.

Edit, drag it where it goes, save

The steps on a job run left to right as dots on a bar. Signed is the first one, then the draws and the work steps in the order they happen, then paid and closed at the end. Normally that bar is locked. Tapping a dot does what tapping a dot should do, which is show you what is behind it. Nothing slides.

When something is in the wrong place, you press Edit order. The dots that are allowed to move become draggable. You pick one up, you drag it, and a marker shows you the gap it is going to land in. You drop it there. Then you press Save order, and it is saved.

Cancel leaves the job exactly as it was. So does hitting Escape, and so does walking away from the screen without pressing anything, which is the one people actually do.

What can’t move, and it tells you so

A draw you already billed or already collected does not move. That is history, and history keeps its order.

The part I care about is how it says no. When you are in edit mode, a frozen draw is shown frozen, with a lock on it and a plain note underneath saying that it is billed and therefore fixed. It is not silently skipped, it does not just fail to pick up, and it never leaves you wondering whether you are doing it wrong. A money row that will not move always tells you which rule is holding it.

That is the whole balance. The things that are settled are protected without asking you. The things that are the tool’s guess are yours to correct.

The spot you drop on is the spot that saves

One more piece of this is worth explaining, because it is the kind of detail that decides whether a feature is trustworthy or just present.

An earlier version of this used a dialog. You tapped a step, and it offered you a list of places to put it, written out as rows that said before this one, or between this one and that one. The problem was that two different rows in that list could sometimes mean the same actual position, so the dialog would offer you a place the save could not really reach. You would pick it, and the result would not be quite what you asked for.

Dragging fixed that by making the offer and the outcome the same object. A drop gap only appears where the step can genuinely be anchored. If you can drop on it, it saves there. And if a whole arrangement cannot be written for some reason, the save refuses and names the specific rows that are the problem, instead of half-saving and letting you find out later.

What this connects to

The order is not just paint on a screen. The money band sits on that same job screen and carries the contract, what you have collected, what is remaining, and the costs going out against it. Once the sequence reads the way the job actually runs, that band is describing a job you recognize.

Billing a draw pushes a real invoice to QuickBooks with the tax handled, and the invoice number and amounts come back onto the milestone. If somebody already billed that draw outside the tool, you say so right on the row. And when the scan finds an invoice in QuickBooks that matches a milestone you have not marked, the row stops telling you to invoice it and asks you to confirm the one that is already there.

All of that depends on the list being in the right order first. It is the same reason a change order has to land on the job itself instead of in an email thread, and the same reason knowing whether you made money starts with the job screen being honest about where the job is.

Straight about where this stands

The drag ordering is in the tool now, and it works the way I described it: Edit order, drag any dot that is allowed to move, Save order, with billed draws locked and labeled.

It came out of my own job being wrong on my own screen, which is where a fair amount of what we build comes from. When you run into the version of this that I have not hit yet, tell me, and it will shape what gets built next.