The year has a shape, and the bank balance should know it
Pool and spa cash does not flow, it surges: two service crunches, one install peak, one long trough. Our first deliverable in a Fractional CFO engagement is a twelve-month cash calendar that names each season's job, so a strong July balance is read as a budget for February rather than a scorecard for July.
| Season | Cash in | Cash out | The decision that season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring | Openings, package renewals, build deposits | Chemical buy, seasonal hires, truck prep | How much of the surge is already spoken for |
| Summer | Stage invoices, weekly routes, counter sales | Subs, crew payroll, fuel, remittances | What the winter reserve must reach by Labour Day |
| Fall | Closings, hot tub season opening | Winterizing costs, year-end tax, bonuses | Who winter keeps, argued from numbers |
| Winter | Hot tub retail and service, next year's deposits | Rent, core payroll, insurance, loan payments | Next season's pricing and hires, set early |
Deposits are fuel you have not yet earned
A build's cash curve bends the wrong way: the deposit arrives, then excavation, shell or liner and the equipment package consume it before the first stage invoice goes out. Run three builds at once and the bank balance stops meaning anything without a job-level cash view. We track each build's cash position separately, so one project's deposit never quietly finances another's overrun, and the summer balance gets split into three honest piles: money earned, work owed, and remittances waiting for their date.
The fix also runs upstream, into the contracts themselves. A stage schedule that invoices just ahead of each cost milestone, excavation, shell, decking, startup, keeps every build closer to cash-neutral, and it is a negotiating point at signing, not a bookkeeping choice in August. We review the stage structure on new-build templates once a year with exactly that lens.
Who winter keeps is a math question
The layoff-and-rehire cycle has costs that never get their own statement line: spring recruiting, training weeks at full wage, the quality dip while a new tech learns a hundred backyards, and the risk that your best installer takes a competitor's call in March. So we price both sides. Beside each key person's winter carry cost goes the winter work that can absorb them: hot tubs need service in January, liner replacements and renovations can be quoted and scheduled for the off-season, and next year's route renewals can be sold by phone from the shop. Some roles still wind down with an ROE and come back in April; the point is that the list is chosen from numbers, not defaulted to whoever asked last.
The same discipline prices the two service crunches. Openings and closings compress most of the book into a pair of roughly six-week windows, so crew capacity, not demand, is the revenue ceiling; whether to add overtime, a temporary crew or a higher price to the peak weeks is a margin calculation we run before the window opens, not a scramble inside it.
The floor and the chemical wall are cash wearing price tags
Hot tubs on the showroom floor and the spring chemical order are the two largest inventory bets of the year, and both answer to the same question: how fast does the cash come back? We watch turns by line, flag floor units aging past the season they were bought for, and size the spring chemical order against last year's actual sell-through instead of the distributor's suggestion. Where floor-plan financing carries the showroom, its cost belongs inside each unit's margin, not buried in a general interest line. All of it reads off the monthly close, which is why this work pairs naturally with End-to-End Accounting keeping the numbers current.
Financing sized to the trough, arranged in the peak
Banks say yes in August and maybe in January, so the operating line gets sized to the winter trough and renewed while the season's statements are strong, with equipment borrowing matched to the life of the assets it buys. Walla Assaf spent years in banking and corporate finance before founding Tauro, and it shows in how the lender package is assembled and how covenants get negotiated, with Business Financing Advisory behind any live deal. The engagement runs monthly on an agreed scope, quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, for pool and spa companies across Mississauga and the GTA.
