A contractor's WIP schedule and CPA statements, spread into your format and tied out.

A contractor's CPA sends the financial statements, often with a schedule of contracts in progress and one of completed contracts, and between statements the contractor sends its own work-in-progress schedule. An account manager moves all of it into your agency's format: contract price, cost to date, estimated gross profit, billings, and over and under billings for each job, beside the balance sheet and income statement lines the surety reads against them.

In the proof of concept, AI reads copies of those files and drafts the spread job by job. It works out earned revenue and over or under billings from the figures on the schedule, and lists every number that doesn't tie to the statement, with the page on each side. It doesn't change a figure, correct a CPA or judge the contractor.

The columns depend on who built the schedule. SBA Form 994F, the schedule of work in process a small contractor gives its surety agent for a Surety Bond Guarantee application, has contract price including approved change orders, total billed to date including retainages with any disputes explained, total cost to date and total estimated cost to complete. It asks for all work, bonded and unbonded, with cost plus jobs noted, and SBA collects a new one on a Prior Approval application when more than 90 days have passed since the last. A CPA's schedule of contracts in progress uses different column names and a different order, and a contractor's own report may match neither. The draft maps each onto your format and lists anything it couldn't place.

What goes in a column is a rule. One surety's published instructions for its work-in-progress form say contract price and estimated cost should carry approved change orders only and leave out claims and disputed items. Unit price jobs get restated at the original price and cost per unit, costs leave out general and administrative overhead, billings and costs carry the same date, and estimated cost to complete has to be a revised figure, not merely a subtraction. Your format has its own version of those rules, and they go into the success criteria.

Tying out is most of the job. Under billings on the schedule should match the asset line the CPA uses for them, and over billings the matching liability. Revenue earned during the period, across open jobs and jobs finished in it, should add up to the income statement, and job costs to cost of revenue the same way. Job names and numbers have to agree between the contractor's report and the CPA's, which is the point one bond agency stresses in its advice to CPAs. A job that vanished from last quarter's schedule and isn't on the completed list is a question for the contractor. The draft shows each tie, both figures and the gap, and leaves the difference for your account manager to run down.

The statement says what the numbers mean. The level of the CPA's work belongs on every spread. A preparation engagement under the AICPA's AR-C 70 usually comes with no report, only a statement on each page that no assurance is provided; a compilation, a review and an audit sit above it. The basis matters as well, since a contractor's own cash-basis figures won't line up with a CPA's percentage-of-completion numbers until someone reconciles them. CPA notes under ASC 606 name the method used to measure progress, input or output, and give opening and closing balances of receivables, contract assets and contract liabilities unless they are shown separately, though a nonpublic company can leave out other quantitative detail. The draft records the statement date, the level of work and the basis from the page. It gives no accounting advice.

Underwriters adjust what a spread shows. A surety's published guidance to contractors lists soft assets it leaves out, among them goodwill, notes from shareholders or employees, deferred tax assets, restricted cash and receivables more than 90 days past due, and it asks for a CPA review or audit within 150 days of year-end, with internal numbers about 60 days after. A bond agency's note to CPAs adds that the 90-day cut doesn't count retention. A CPA firm's write-up warns that over billings stop being healthy when they turn into job borrow, one job's cash covering another's losses, so large over billings should show up as cash and receivables on the balance sheet. The draft marks what your format calls for and notes the dates. Whether an asset counts stays with the surety's underwriter.

With your reviewer's yes, new schedules and statements go through the same job for about 30 days.

An account manager approves each spread before it goes to a surety or into your files. The AI never changes a contractor's numbers, adjusts an asset on its own or says anything about capacity; the surety's underwriter handles that.

Scoring continues on the same written criteria. Other jobs wait their turn, each with its own price, and monthly support follows.