On a foundation job, you spend the money before you collect it.
Piers + materials
ordered before the crew mobilizes
Crew payroll
paid weekly, work in progress
Deposit + mid draw
fire on the pipeline stage
You did the work. Somewhere between the deposit and the final, the billing fell behind the crew.
The draw schedule is not paperwork. It is the only thing keeping your operating account above water while three crews are in the ground and every one of them is spending your money faster than the homeowners are sending theirs.
Then the usual setup gets in the way. Someone has to remember to bill each stage by hand. Checks come in, get driven to the bank, then keyed into accounting a second time. And the real damage is the quiet kind: a mid-project draw that never went out because the rep marked the job “in production” but nobody flipped it to billing. It surfaces at month end, if it surfaces at all, and by then the crew is three jobs down the road and that cash is funding a homeowner’s new kitchen instead of your next payroll.
The problem is almost never that homeowners will not pay. It is that the bill never reached them.
What billing should do on its own
The deposit is ready the second the contract is signed. The mid-project draw fires by itself when the job hits production. The final bills when the job is marked complete. The homeowner pays online, the money lands on your account, and it is already reconciled in QuickBooks. Nobody has to remember anything, because the pipeline is doing the remembering.
Tie every draw to a stage on the board, then stop thinking about it.
Set your schedule once. Point each draw at the pipeline stage that should trigger it. When a job enters that stage, the milestone invoice is created automatically. No sticky notes, no “did we bill the second draw yet,” no revenue quietly left in the ground.
Deposit · 20%
on contract signed
Mid-project · 40%
fires at "Production started"
Final · 40%
fires at "Job complete"
The stage the job is already in becomes the trigger
Your payment schedule lives at the business level: a deposit, a mid-project draw, a final, in whatever split you run. Each item points at a pipeline stage. Drag the job into “Production started” and the mid-project draw invoices itself. Mark it “Job complete” and the final fires. Because the crew moving the job is what triggers the bill, billing keeps exact pace with the work instead of lagging a week behind whoever remembers to do it.
Stage-triggered draws
So the invoice is created the instant the job enters the tied stage.
A visual progress panel
on the job showing what is paid, what is due, and what is coming.
The schedule carries from the contract
So the draws are set the moment the deal is signed.
The money lands on your account, not in someone else's holding tank.
Payments run through a built-in Stripe integration, so the homeowner pays a deposit or a draw right from the invoice link, by card or by bank transfer, without leaving the platform. The funds settle to your own connected Stripe account, not into someone else’s holding tank, so you are not waiting on a middleman to release your money on their timeline. For big-ticket final payments you can steer the homeowner toward ACH by default with a dollar threshold, so a $10,000 balance does not hand a card processor a cut. And if you want to pass card fees along, an optional surcharge toggle does exactly that.
Funds settle on your own account
Straight to your own connected Stripe account, with a 0.5% Oblyss platform fee on top of Stripe's standard processing.
Card or ACH
With a threshold that steers large final payments to ACH by default.
Optional surcharge pass-through
To move card processing fees to the customer where you allow it.
Mid-project draw
Paid · ACHRun the right draw schedule for the state the house sits in.
Default schedule plus per-state overrides
Applied by the property's state.
Applied automatically
So nobody has to remember which state caps the deposit.
Business default
Standard payment schedule
Tennessee job
TN override applied
Card / ACH steering
Payment method routing
Paid once, recorded once, reconciled without a second entry.
Every payment already knows which job and which draw it belongs to, so it never becomes a data-entry chore for the office at month end. Invoices and customers push to QuickBooks Online, expenses and paid statuses pull back, and you can see what is outstanding at a glance instead of waiting on a close.
Two-way QuickBooks Online sync
Invoices push from the job to QuickBooks, and a one-click re-sync fixes anything that drifts. Customers push over as QuickBooks customers, so you are not keeping two lists in step by hand. Expenses pull back and auto-categorize, and when a homeowner pays an invoice in QuickBooks, the status updates here too. A sync dashboard shows the last sync, the counts, and any errors, so a mismatch surfaces on the screen instead of hiding until the accountant trips over it.
Invoice and customer push
Expense and payment pull, in both directions.
A sync dashboard
With counts, last sync time, and an error log you can act on.
A/R aging you can actually read
Getting paid and making money are not the same thing.
A job can collect every dollar on the contract and still lose you margin once the real cost comes in. Set your overhead and COGS targets, and each job shows what it actually earned after cost. Split one supplier purchase partly to a job’s cost and partly to overhead in a single transaction, so allocation matches how the money was really spent. When a job runs past your cost-of-goods target, it gets a warning badge on the profit report, so the estimate that quietly bled margin is flagged before you bid the next one just like it.
- Configurable overhead and COGS targets that flow into per-job profit.
- COGS-target warning badges on jobs that ran over, right on the profit report.
A job can collect every dollar on the contract and still lose you margin once the real cost comes in. Set your overhead and COGS targets, and each job shows what it actually earned after cost. Split one supplier purchase partly to a job’s cost and partly to overhead in a single transaction, so allocation matches how the money was really spent. When a job runs past your cost-of-goods target, it gets a warning badge on the profit report, so the estimate that quietly bled margin is flagged before you bid the next one just like it.
12 Maple Court
Job costs are above the expected target.
Frequently asked questions
What is milestone billing for a foundation repair job?
Why does cash flow get so tight on a foundation job?
Do the draws really bill on their own, or does someone have to send them?
Where does the money go when a homeowner pays online?
Can I run a different payment schedule in different states?
Does this sync with QuickBooks?
Can I pass the card processing fee to the customer?
Optionally, yes. A surcharge pass-through toggle moves card processing fees to the customer where you choose to enable it. You can also set a dollar threshold that steers big final payments to ACH by default, which avoids the card fee on your largest balances entirely.