Profitable and well capitalised, but two clients hold more than half your revenue and $790K of your cash is sitting overdue with customers.
Two builders — Marwick Constructions Group ($1.78M, 28.0%) and Trilex Projects ($1.70M, 26.8%) — account for 54.8% of YTD revenue. If either one slowed work or pushed payment, your bank balance would empty inside 8 weeks.
$790K of the $1.59M owed to you is past its due date. The single biggest item is Trilex Projects ($429K, 1 month overdue). Your debtor days are sitting at 76 — about a month longer than they should be for a builder pipeline.
SimPro shows 43.2% job margin. Xero shows 32.1% across the same period — an 11.1 percentage point overstatement. The cause: $695K of subcontractor, labour hire and equipment cost sits in Xero but never lands on a job in SimPro. Every quote you have sent this year was priced off numbers that were too generous.
Collect the $429K from Trilex Projects this week. Have the office manager call their accounts payable contact today. If they need a structured payment plan, lock it in before week's end.
Allocate every subcontractor and labour hire invoice to the right job in SimPro. Right now $695K of cost is missing from job costing. Until this is fixed, every quote you write is mispriced.
Set a hard rule: no single client over 25% of revenue. Keep Marwick and Trilex happy, but actively chase 3 new builder relationships this quarter to dilute the concentration.
Decide on Solar & Batteries. The division has lost $135K YTD on $199K of revenue. Either fix the pricing model (jobs are losing 68% net) or close it down before the financial year ends.
Have a productivity conversation with the bottom four field staff this fortnight. Sarris (26%), Moretti (41%), Kelso (45%), Mullins (53%) — identify whether they're estimators, supervisors, on training, or genuinely under-utilised.
You have a profitable, well-capitalised business and a 5-month cash buffer. None of the issues above are urgent in the bank-balance sense. But the same business twelve months from now — if Marwick slows down, Trilex stretches payment to 90 days, and the SimPro data keeps under-pricing jobs — could easily look like FY25 again, where margin sat at 20.8% and net profit was 80% lower. The good news: every one of these is fixable, and you have the cash and the management capacity to fix them now while the wind is at your back.
Your monthly cash overhead — everything you have to pay just to keep the lights on — runs around $141K. Here's the breakdown:
| Item | 10-month total | Monthly average |
|---|---|---|
| Total Operating Expenses (Xero, YTD) | $1,283,700 | $128,370 |
| Plus: Estimated tax provision (based on FY25) | $130,400 | $13,040 |
| = Cash Overhead | $1,414,100 | $141,410/mo |
| of which Management wages & super | $358,900 | $35,890/mo |
| of which Owner dividends | $156,200 | $15,620/mo |
| of which Tax provision (estimate) | $130,400 | $13,040/mo |
| of which Everything else (vehicles, fuel, rent, software, etc.) | $768,600 | $76,860/mo |
Note: depreciation has been excluded because it is not a cash cost. Income tax is not on your YTD P&L (it gets booked at year end), so we have estimated it from FY25.
| Scenario | Required monthly revenue | vs recent (~$681K/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| 32.6% margin (last 3 months blended) | $433,773 | +57% buffer — comfortable |
| 32.1% margin (YTD blended) | $440,530 | +55% buffer — comfortable |
| 30.0% margin (industry target) | $471,367 | +44% buffer — healthy |
| 20.8% margin (FY25 actual) | $679,856 | +0.2% — right on the line |
Your monthly running costs (wages, rent, fuel, insurance, owner pay, tax) total about $141K. Every month, your jobs need to generate enough gross profit to cover that — otherwise you're dipping into savings. At your current 32.1% margin, you need $441K/month of revenue just to break even. Over the last three months you've averaged $681K/month — about $240K above the line. That is a healthy buffer.
But here's the warning shot: in January 2026 your revenue dropped to $258K, your margin collapsed to 9.8%, and you lost $97K in a single month. February was almost as bad. You do not have a structural break-even problem — you have a volatility problem. One slow month at low margin wipes out two great months.
Two clients are 54.8% of your revenue. Top 5 are 77.5%.
| Client | YTD revenue | % of total | SimPro GP% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marwick Constructions Group | $1,780,600 | 28.0% | 47.9% |
| Trilex Projects Pty Ltd | $1,699,300 | 26.8% | 51.4% |
| Formline Projects | $617,000 | 9.7% | 50.2% |
| Vantage Interiors | $481,600 | 7.6% | 48.1% |
| Stonebridge Constructions | $345,400 | 5.4% | 48.6% |
| Top 5 total | $4,923,900 | 77.5% | — |
| All other clients (~70 customers) | $1,428,400 | 22.5% | — |
The top 5 clients are all profitable — in fact they're your most profitable jobs in SimPro. That's the upside. The downside: if Marwick finishes their current project run and Trilex decides to use a competitor on the next development, you lose $3.48M of revenue overnight. That's half again as much as your cash and receivables combined. It would force redundancies inside two months. Most builders have a top 1 client around 15–20% of revenue. You're at 28%.
$1.59M is owed to you. $790K of that — half — is already overdue.
| Bucket | Amount | % of AR |
|---|---|---|
| Current (not yet due) | $586,100 | 36.9% |
| < 1 month past due | $213,400 | 13.4% |
| 1 month past due | $660,700 | 41.6% |
| 2 months past due | $0 | 0.0% |
| 3 months past due | $5,300 | 0.3% |
| Older than 3 months | $124,100 | 7.8% |
| Total | $1,589,600 | 100% |
| Customer | Overdue amount | Bucket |
|---|---|---|
| Trilex Projects | $428,600 | 1 month |
| National Shopfit Group | $68,900 | 1 month |
| Formline Projects | $67,200 | 1 month (plus $27,400 older) |
| Riverina Premium Quarries | $67,100 | 1 month + Older |
| Marwick Constructions | $59,800 | Older (90+ days) |
| Hallmark Constructions | $24,600 | 1 month + Older |
Three quarters of a million dollars of cash that should be in your account is sitting in your customers' accounts. The single largest item — $429K from Trilex Projects — is the same builder who is 27% of your revenue. Concentration risk and collection risk are stacking on top of each other. If you collected just the overdue portion, your bank balance jumps from $731K to ~$1.52M and your cash buffer goes from 5 months to almost 11.
Same period (1 Jul 2025 to 30 Apr 2026). Two systems. Two very different numbers.
| Line | SimPro | Xero | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue (ex GST) | $6,309,400 | $6,352,300 | $42,900 (0.7%) — OK |
| Direct labour (incl. labour hire) | $1,208,000 | $1,508,900 | $300,900 missing! |
| Materials | $2,368,700 | $2,404,900 | $36,200 (1.5%) — OK |
| Subcontractors | $8,100 | $334,500 | $326,400 missing! |
| Equipment hire | (not allocated) | $67,400 | $67,400 missing |
| Gross Profit | $2,724,600 (43.2%) | $2,036,600 (32.1%) | −11.1 percentage points |
SimPro is telling you that your jobs make 43 cents of gross profit on every revenue dollar. The reality in Xero — the system the ATO relies on — is 32 cents. The difference is $695K of subcontractor invoices, labour hire and equipment hire that are in Xero but never allocated to a job in SimPro.
The practical impact: when you priced jobs over the last 10 months using SimPro's profitability data, you were quoting against a margin that was roughly 11 percentage points too generous. On a $50K job that "looks like" $21.5K profit in SimPro, the true profit is closer to $16K. Multiply that across 361 invoices.
| Cost centre | Revenue | Net profit (SimPro) | Net margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Underground Mains & NBN | $1,192,300 | $452,400 | 37.9% |
| General Electrical | $3,332,200 | $987,300 | 29.6% |
| Switchboards | $918,600 | $268,900 | 29.3% |
| Data | $268,100 | $124,700 | 46.5% |
| Service & Repairs | $146,400 | $37,900 | 25.9% |
| Retail Fitout | $179,700 | $41,600 | 23.1% |
| CCTV & Alarms | $72,800 | $15,900 | 21.8% |
| Solar & Batteries | $199,300 | −$134,800 | −67.6% |
| Industrial Automation | $0 | −$33,600 | No revenue |
| Call Backs / Fix Ups | $0 | −$5,700 | No revenue |
Seven out of ten cost centres are healthily profitable — that's the foundation of the business. But three are bleeding:
Across 22 field staff, 75.7% of paid hours were billed to jobs in April. That's 828 unbilled hours at an average $96/hr cost — $79K of labour cost in one month that wasn't directly recovered through job pricing.
| Metric | April 2026 | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Total hours worked | 3,412.0 | — |
| Hours on jobs | 2,584.5 | — |
| Productivity rate | 75.7% | Amber — below 85% target |
| Unbilled hours | 827.5 | — |
| Cost of unbilled time | ~$79,440 | ~$953K annualised |
| Employee | Productivity | Notes (assumed) |
|---|---|---|
| Danny Sarris | 26.4% | Apprentice or estimator? Confirm before action. |
| Jesse Moretti | 40.8% | Same — check role. |
| Nathan Kelso | 44.9% | Same — possibly supervisor / off-site. |
| Craig Mullins | 53.2% | Senior/Foreman? Often expected to be lower. |
This isn't necessarily a "people aren't working" problem. Apprentices, estimators, supervisors, and people on training or RDOs all show as low productivity but are doing exactly what you want them to do. The action isn't to discipline anyone — it's to understand why each name is on the list. If two of the four are genuinely under-utilised tradesmen, that's $27–32K/month of labour cost not earning revenue. If they're all doing legitimate non-billable work, you may need to allocate that work to a "Yard / Training / Estimating" cost centre in SimPro so it stops dragging the productivity number down.
YTD net profit is $765K. Bank balance moved from $668K (30 June 2025) to $732K (12 May 2026) — up just $63K. So where did the other $702K go?
| Item | Approx. movement |
|---|---|
| Net profit (P&L) YTD | +$765,300 |
| Less: increase in trade debtors (cash stuck with customers) | −$196,000 |
| Less: increase in retentions held by clients | −$57,000 |
| Plus: depreciation add-back (non-cash, ~$154K for 10 months) | +$154,000 |
| Less: net asset / equipment purchases (vehicles, plant, office equipment) | −$281,000 |
| Less: HP loan principal repayments (net) | −$133,000 |
| Less: trade creditors paid down | −$529,000 |
| Less: tax / BAS / PAYG paid in cash | −$219,000 |
| Plus: shareholder loan movement / other | +$559,000 |
| Approximate cash movement | ~+$63,300 |
You made $765K in profit, but $196K of that "profit" is sitting in customer accounts as unpaid invoices, $281K went into new vehicles and plant, and ~$529K went to paying down the supplier balance that had built up at June year-end. That's why the bank only moved $63K despite a strong P&L. None of these movements are wrong — replacing vehicles, settling trade creditors, and (eventually) collecting receivables are all normal business cycles. But this is exactly why "profit" and "cash" are not the same thing.
| When | Action | Who | Expected outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1–2 | Call Trilex Projects to lock in payment on $429K overdue. Get a written date. | Office manager / Owner | Cash buffer jumps from 5.2 to ~8.2 months. |
| Week 1–2 | Call Marwick about the $60K in the 90+ day bucket. | Office manager | Clears the worst-aged item. |
| Week 1–2 | Pull last 30 subbie and labour hire invoices from Xero, allocate them to jobs in SimPro under "Contractor Invoice". | Bookkeeper / Owner | Closes the largest gap in SimPro vs Xero. |
| Week 3–4 | Decide on Solar & Batteries: re-price the offer or wind up the division. | Owner + GM | Stops the $135K YTD bleed. |
| Week 3–4 | Sit down with each of Sarris, Moretti, Kelso, Mullins and confirm role / billable expectation. Set up "Yard/Training" cost centre in SimPro for legitimate non-billable time. | Field manager | Productivity number becomes meaningful and actionable. |
| Week 3–4 | Tighten quoting terms: fortnightly progress claims on jobs over $50K, 7-day late fee clause. | Owner | Pushes debtor days back below 45 over time. |
| Month 2 | BDM-style outreach to 6 mid-tier builders in the same geography as Marwick / Trilex. | Owner (4 hrs / week) | Pipeline of 2–3 new accounts within 6 months. |
| Month 2 | Review discretionary opex lines (gifts, training, travel, software). Target a $12K/month trim. | Owner + Bookkeeper | Drops break-even by ~$40K/month at 30% margin. |
| Month 2 | Confirm bookkeeping treatment: dividends as drawings vs operating expense; tax provision posted monthly. | Accountant | YTD net profit becomes a true number, not a flattering one. |
| Month 3 | Re-run the SimPro Customer Rank and Profit/Loss reports. Confirm subbie allocation has stuck. | Owner | True customer profitability becomes visible. |
| Month 3 | Set FY27 revenue target with capacity check (current team can comfortably bill ~$8.4M at 85% productivity). | Owner + GM | Plan for FY27 grounded in reality, not last year's numbers. |
Northvale Electrical has built something real. Revenue has grown from $4.9M to a $7.6M run rate in three years, the team is 22 field staff plus office, and the balance sheet shows $2.02M in net assets — up from $448K four years ago. That's the foundation. The next step isn't more revenue — it's making the existing revenue safer and more profitable: spread the customer base, get the SimPro data right, and protect the 32%+ margin that you've built this year. Do those three consistently and an $8.5M year at a sustainable 8–10% net margin is not just achievable — it's the logical next step.