Read the backlog the way a lender reads a P&L
Your sold-not-installed list is next quarter's income statement, so we manage it with income-statement discipline. That means three views, kept current: backlog in dollars, backlog in install-weeks against real crew capacity, and backlog by age, because an order sold in March that has not installed by August is a cancellation risk and a review waiting to be written. It also means margin quality: a book stuffed with promo-priced jobs installs just as slowly as a full-price book but pays far worse, and only a margin-weighted view shows it.
Those numbers are also the honest sales dashboard. Cost per sold job and close rate from in-home appointments tell you whether the marketing spend that filled the funnel actually filled the install calendar, before a slow winter announces it for you.
Two kinds of cash, one bank account
Deposit cash belongs to jobs you have not done; earned cash is yours. The forecast we keep is keyed to the install schedule rather than the bank feed: manufacturer payments land when product ships, crew payroll tracks the install calendar, HST and instalments hit on their own dates, and each completion converts a slice of the float into money you may actually deploy. Run that forward a season and the questions that keep owners up become arithmetic: whether the summer payment run to your supplier clears without the line of credit, and how many weeks of winter the fall collections will fund.
The financing program is a margin decision
Third-party consumer financing closes bigger tickets and pays you within days while the homeowner pays over years, and none of that is free: the finance company funds the contract price minus a dealer fee, and the softer the promotion, the bigger the fee. That fee comes off your margin, not the customer's price, so a financed job quoted at the cash price is a quiet discount you never approved.
The CFO treatment is to run the program like a product line. We track financing penetration and margin net of fees job by job, decide which promotions the sales team may offer without approval, and make sure promo-heavy months are priced to carry their fees. Offered deliberately, the program grows average ticket and pulls cash forward; offered reflexively, it converts your margin into the finance company's revenue.
Winter is capacity you can sell
Booking peaks in spring and fall, but installs do not have to stop in January; interior work continues in cold weather, and a crew you lay off in December must be found, rehired and retrained in April. So the winter question is a costed choice between three options: carry the crew idle, fill the calendar with a winter-install offer priced from crew-cost coverage, or shrink to a service-only bench. We put numbers on each before November, alongside a marketing plan that follows the booking curve and stretches further when co-op credits are actually claimed.
| Stretch of the year | What is really happening | What we watch |
|---|---|---|
| Early spring | Show season and the booking surge | Close rate, cost per sold job, deposit inflow |
| Summer | Factories work through the queue | Supplier lead times, backlog age, payment runs |
| Fall | The install push | Crew throughput, remake rate, cash conversion |
| Winter | Thin booking, open crew capacity | Winter slot fill, weeks of cash cover |
Growth, papered for the credit desk
A bigger showroom, warehouse racking, a second install crew or a retiring competitor's service book each need money, and lenders read window-company statements with two questions loaded: how seasonal is it, and how much of the cash is deposits. Walla Assaf spent a decade in banking and corporate finance before founding Tauro, so the file we build answers both before they are asked, with compiled statements where the bank requires them and Business Financing Advisory when the ask outgrows a van loan.
The engagement runs monthly or quarterly, scoped in writing after a free discovery call, and it works from the same ledgers our End-to-End Accounting team keeps, so the deposit liability, rebate accruals and job margins are already trustworthy before Fractional CFO work builds on them. For a Mississauga or GTA dealer, that is a controller's insight without a controller's salary.
