A cash forecast shaped like your year
The shoulder months are not a surprise; they arrive on schedule every April and October, so the forecast should already hold them. We keep a rolling 13-week cash forecast that lays payroll, truck payments, HST remittances, corporate instalments and WSIB against the revenue curve, so the slow weeks are pre-funded instead of survived. A line of credit sized in the strong months, when the statements look their best, costs less than one negotiated from weakness.
Maintenance-plan billings are the counterweight: steady cash in the months the phone cools down, which is one more reason the plan book deserves the careful treatment it gets on our accounting page. The CFO view watches its size and renewal rate as the stabilizers they are.
Collection policy is a forecast lever too. A deposit on every install, payment on completion for residential work, consumer financing that pays you in days while the homeowner pays over years, and builder receivables chased on terms rather than on hope: each one moves cash weeks earlier without changing a single price. We set those policies with you and then watch the forecast prove whether they hold.
The crew question, answered with arithmetic
An install crew is a truck, tools and payroll that start weeks before their revenue does, so the decision is arithmetic, not appetite. We model it in three numbers: installed revenue per crew-week at your real close rate, the backlog in crew-weeks you can actually sell into, and the cash cover needed to carry the new crew through its first shoulder season. When backlog holds above the threshold for a full season, hiring is a plan; when it does not, overtime and smarter scheduling beat a layoff next spring.
Pricing feeds the same model. A burdened labour rate, meaning wage plus CPP, EI, WSIB, truck cost and the idle hours between calls, is what installs must be quoted from. Quoting from the wage alone is how busy companies lose money with confidence. The same arithmetic runs in reverse at the other end of the season: keeping a good tech through a slow winter is often cheaper than recruiting and training a replacement in May, and the forecast shows exactly what carrying that payroll costs.
The numbers on the wall
| Metric | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Install gross margin by job | Are quotes keeping up with equipment prices? |
| Service labour utilization | How many paid hours actually got billed? |
| Backlog in crew-weeks | Is there enough sold work to justify the payroll? |
| Plan members and renewal rate | Is the stabilizer growing or leaking? |
| Cash cover through the next shoulder | How many slow weeks can we fund today? |
Five numbers, monthly, each tied to a decision someone will actually make. Dashboards with forty metrics get admired once and never opened again.
Less weather in the revenue
The long game is a flatter curve, and it is built deliberately. We set targets for the mix that does it: a plan attached to every install, commercial maintenance contracts that bill monthly, and shoulder-season offers priced to keep crews moving rather than to maximize margin. Heat-pump work helps too, since equipment that heats and cools generates calls in both seasons. None of this is exotic; it is a quarterly review where the mix targets get the same attention the sales number does.
Growth money, papered properly
More trucks, a shop with racking, or buying a competitor's plan book: each needs a lender file, and lenders read HVAC statements with the seasonality question already loaded. Walla Assaf came to public practice from banking and corporate finance, so our Fractional CFO work builds the case the way a credit desk reads it, with compiled statements where the bank requires them and Business Financing Advisory when the ask is bigger than a truck loan. For a Mississauga or GTA shop, that means walking in with the seasonal story answered before it is asked.
The cadence is monthly or quarterly, sized to the decisions in front of you, and it works from the same books our accounting team keeps, so no hour is spent re-explaining the numbers. You get a CPA who has sat on the lender's side of the table, without a full-time controller's salary on the payroll.
