You are waiting on a $60,000 draw and payroll is next week. What bridges it?

You bought the materials and paid the crew in week one. The draw is approved but sits in an owner's or a general contractor's payment cycle for thirty days, sometimes forty-five. Payroll is Friday. The contractor forums describe it in numbers that recur: a $15,000 install on net-30 with payroll due the following week, or a company with $200,000 in receivables that cannot make Friday.

That is not a business in trouble. It is a business that is owed money on a schedule the payroll does not follow. The product for it is short, priced for a month or two, and repaid the week the draw lands.

A working capital loan or a cash advance. Both read your last three to six months of business deposits and lend against the pattern. A contractor whose statements show draws landing every four to six weeks, in lumps, is exactly the file a revenue-based funder is built to read — and exactly the one a bank's smooth-line model rejects.

Decision in about a day, money in one to three business days. Apply Monday for a Friday payroll and it is achievable. Apply Thursday and you are funding next week's.

Amounts run half to one and a half times a month's deposits. Borrow the payroll and the materials for the next phase, not the whole draw. Money you do not need still costs money.

Send the contract schedule with the statements: what is signed, what is billed, what is approved and unpaid. It is the single strongest document a contractor can put in front of an underwriter, because it turns a deposit gap into a dated receivable.

Ask for weekly payments. A daily debit against an account that fills up once a month is how a sensible bridge turns into an overdraft. Weekly matches how the crew is paid and how the money arrives.

Ask whether you can pay the balance off the week the draw clears, and what that saves. On a fixed-factor advance the answer is usually nothing, so you may prefer a term loan with interest that stops when you repay. On a $30,000 bridge repaid in five weeks the difference is real.

One bridge is a bridge. The same gap on every draw is your working capital cycle, and the product for a cycle is a line of credit: drawn for materials and payroll, repaid from the draw, costing nothing when it is not drawn. It is harder to qualify for and slower to set up, which is why you set it up in a good month rather than in the week of the shortfall.

Retainage makes the case stronger. Five to ten percent of every contract held back for months is money you have earned and cannot spend, and a line sized to it is the honest way to run a subcontracting business without an advance on every job.