A commercial contractor can have a full project backlog, a skilled crew and a signed contract. And still run out of cash.
It's a scenario Raffi Elchemmas has heard more than once. As a senior industry advisor at ServiceTitan who spent five years as executive director of Safety, Health, and Risk Management at the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA), he has seen billing complexity quietly undermine businesses that are, by every other measure, performing well.
The issue is the gap between completing work and getting paid for it.
"In construction, cash flow is oxygen," Elchemmas said. "Billing complexity is often the hidden bottleneck that limits growth long before operational capacity does."
Where Growth Gets Complicated
The billing challenge doesn't shrink as a contractor scales. It compounds.
Each new client brings a different set of requirements: forms, schedules of values, lien waivers, supporting documentation. What works for one general contractor won't satisfy the next. As project volume grows, so does the administrative burden. And the margin for error. A single missing document or a billing package that doesn't match contract requirements can push payment back 30, 60, even 90 days.
The underlying problem is structural: many contractors scale operations faster than they scale back-office controls.
When payments are delayed, the cause is usually a documentation failure that occurred weeks earlier.
"Payment disputes can start months before the invoice is submitted," Elchemmas said, "because documentation and controls were not established early in the project."
Unapproved change orders, incomplete billing packages and contract-specific requirements that weren't captured upfront are among the most common culprits.
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From Reactive to Strategic
The contractors who get this right, Elchemmas said, think about billing differently.
"For exceptional contractors, billing is not an accounting activity — it is a core business control," Elchemmas said. "The companies that consistently outperform their peers are often not the ones building projects faster; they are the ones converting completed work into cash more predictably, more accurately, and with less friction than their competitors."
Technology that automates billing workflows supports that shift, transforming the back office from a function that chases payments into one that anticipates them.
"The goal isn't simply faster invoicing," Elchemmas said. "It's creating predictable cash flow and reducing uncertainty across the business."
ServiceTitan's billing tools are built around this principle:
Progress Billing: Enables milestone-based invoicing, so contractors can bill as work is completed rather than waiting until project close.
AIA Billing: Generates AIA-standard payment applications in a single click, producing the standardized documents that commercial clients and general contractors recognize and approve faster.
Consolidated Billing: Addresses multi-party complexity, allowing contractors to split costs accurately across multiple stakeholders on a single project.
The goal is consistency: the same process, every project, regardless of client.
"You can't deposit a backlog," Elchemmas said, "and you can't deposit percent complete. You can only deposit cash. Billing is the bridge between project performance and financial performance."
