Fifteen Minutes a Week on the Money You're Owed
On the list of fires: “the money meeting”
Module 6 · The Money System · Play 1 of 22
In a hurry? ↓ Do this this week
The problem in one breath
Most owners find out how much they're owed the day the bank balance scares them — payroll's Friday, the account's thin, and only then do you go digging for who never paid. By then the oldest money is months gone, cold, and half of it you'll never see.
Why it happens
Money you've already earned doesn't chase you. The finished roof is off your mind — you're onto the next tear-off, the next fire. The invoice sits in a homeowner's pile or a GC's payables and waits, quiet, while you run flat out. Nobody rings your phone to remind you they still owe you. So the money you're owed is the one thing in the business with no alarm on it, and it slides until the slide is a crisis.
The play
Once a week you walk the whole list of every dollar owed to you — out loud, oldest first — and you don't close it until every unpaid invoice has one name and one next move on it. Fifteen minutes. Call it the money meeting.
- Same fifteen minutes, every week. Pick the slot and guard it like the number block (Module 1, "Move One Number Before the Day Runs You"). Fifteen minutes is plenty — this is a fast walk, not a bookkeeping session.
- Pull up every unpaid invoice, oldest at the top. One list, whole company, sorted by the day you invoiced. Oldest goes first because the oldest money is the money most likely to never land — the longer it sits, the colder it gets.
- For each one, ask what changed since last week. Did it get paid? Part of it? Did they promise a date? Or was it silence again? That one question — what moved since last time — is the whole engine. A dollar that hasn't budged in three weeks isn't waiting on you; it's stuck, and stuck money needs a push.
- One name, one next step, one date — before you move on. Every unpaid invoice leaves the meeting with one person on the hook for it (one name on it, Module 2), the exact next move — a call, a second invoice, a firmer letter — and the day it happens by. "The office is on it" is how money dies.
- Tie it to the number you already track. Some weeks this week's one number (Module 1) is dollars collected. When it is, this meeting is where you work it: the list is your worklist, and Friday you score what came in.
Nothing comes off the list until it's paid or you write it off on purpose. Paid-but-late still counts as closed — you got it. Open money that's aging is the only thing you spend the fifteen minutes on.
Do this this week
Build the list once. Open the tool below — or a blank sheet — and put every unpaid invoice on it: customer, job, amount, the date you invoiced, oldest at the top. That single sorted list, sitting in front of you, is the meeting; the fifteen minutes next week is just reading it.
The tool
Or fill it in here — no download →
Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice. Grab it on the phone now — it’ll be waiting on the computer at the shop.
the-money-owed-list.xlsx — the money-owed list. One row per unpaid invoice: customer, job, amount, invoice date, and days outstanding the sheet works out from today. You set one number up top — how many days before you call an invoice late (that's your call, not a rule) — and the sheet flags anything past it as OVERDUE in red, counts your open and overdue invoices, and totals the dollars still out there. One glance tells you what to chase first. One row is filled in as an example. See the sheet notes below.
The sheet tracks what's owed — it prices nothing and does no margin math. And "owed right now" isn't always the whole contract: on commercial jobs a slice is held back until the end, and on bigger jobs you may have already taken a deposit or a draw up front. How much gets held back, when it's released, and how your deposit or draw is set up all come out of your own contract, and often your state's rules — read the contract, enter only what's actually billable today, and don't guess those numbers.
If your crew is 1099
Nothing to adjust — this is the owner's and the office manager's cash work, not anything to do with directing a crew. Whether your roofers are W2 or subs, chasing the money homeowners and GCs owe you is the same job either way.
One more thing: this play is how we run a shop — it's not legal advice. Rules change by state and by contract, so before you act on the legal-sounding parts, run them past your own attorney or accountant. It's your business, and what you do with any of this is your call and your responsibility.
M6-01 · Fifteen Minutes a Week on the Money You're Owed — Roofer MBA, https://roofermba.com/plays/money-system/the-money-meeting
The sheet notesHow the sheet works — the columns and the formulas
The columns, the formulas behind them, and the judgment calls — so you can rebuild it by hand if you ever need to.
What it does
One row per unpaid invoice. You write the customer, the job, the amount owed, and the date you invoiced; the sheet works out days outstanding from today on its own. Set one number in the box on the right — how many days before you call an invoice late — and the sheet flags anything past it as OVERDUE in red, counts your open and overdue invoices, and totals the dollars still owed. One glance tells you what to chase first. Row 5 (yellow) is filled in as an example; delete it before you enter your first real invoice.
How to use it
- Add a row every time you send an invoice that isn't paid yet. One list for the whole company.
- Fill the plain cells: Customer, Job / address, Amount owed, Invoice date, Owner (the one person chasing it), Next action.
- Set Status (column H dropdown): Open or Paid. Mark it Paid the day the money lands.
- Set your line once, top-right: Overdue after (days) — that's your call, not a rule. Thirty is a plain starting point; change it to whatever "late" means for your shop.
- At your weekly money meeting, sort by Invoice date (oldest at the top), read the box on the right, and work anything showing OVERDUE in column I first.
Columns
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| A Customer | Who owes you — homeowner name or the GC. |
| B Job / address | The job the invoice is for. |
| C Amount owed | What's still owed on this invoice. You type it — the sheet never prices anything. |
| D Invoice date | The day you sent the invoice. |
| E Days outstanding | Auto: how many days since the invoice date; blank until you enter a date. |
| F Owner (one name) | The one person on the hook for collecting it. One name, not "the office." |
| G Next action | The exact next move — a call, a second invoice, a firmer letter. |
| H Status | Open / Paid (dropdown). The sheet won't accept any other word — a typo here drops the row out of every count. |
| I Flag | Auto: shows OVERDUE (red) when an Open invoice is older than your threshold; blank otherwise. |
Box on the right: Overdue after (days) — the one number you set; Open invoices, Overdue invoices, and $ still owed (open) — a running total of what's still out there.
Formulas (so you can rebuild it by hand)
- Days outstanding (E5, fill down):
=IF($D5<>"",TODAY()-$D5,"") - Flag (I5, fill down):
=IF(AND($H5<>"Paid",$D5<>"",TODAY()-$D5>$L$4),"OVERDUE","") - Open / Overdue counts (box):
=COUNTIF($H$5:$H$24,"Open")and=COUNTIF($I$5:$I$24,"OVERDUE") - $ still owed (open) (box):
=SUMIF($H$5:$H$24,"Open",$C$5:$C$24)
Only IF, AND, TODAY, COUNTIF, and SUMIF are used — no new-Excel-only functions — so it opens and computes in old Excel, Numbers, and LibreOffice.
Notes / judgment calls
- Invoice date drives the flag; Paid turns it off. An invoice marked Paid never shows OVERDUE, even if it landed late — you collected it. Only Open invoices past your day-count flag.
- The threshold is yours, not an industry fact. Thirty days is a plain default so the sheet does something out of the box. What counts as "late" in roofing — net terms, the 30/60/90 aging most shops watch — is a real number we're not going to invent; set your own line and change it whenever you like.
- Enter only what's billable now. On commercial jobs a slice is held back until the end, and on bigger jobs you may have already taken a deposit or a draw. Those rules are set by contract and often by state, so don't guess them — put in what's actually owed to you today, not the whole contract.
- Partial payments: when a customer pays part, lower the Amount owed to what's left and leave it Open. The total in the box then shows what you're still chasing.
- Insurance-job stages on this list. A storm job's money sits in pieces (Play 13), and each chaseable piece gets its own row here — the deductible you've billed the homeowner, the held depreciation once the final invoice is out, an approved supplement you've billed, a check parked at the lender. Put whoever is holding it — carrier, homeowner, or lender — in Customer, name the piece in Job / address ("Miller — held depreciation"), keep one person's name in Owner, and use the date you billed that piece as the Invoice date, or the aging and the OVERDUE flag do nothing for it. The first carrier check you already banked isn't owed and doesn't get a row.
- The list stops at row 24 — one storm season can fill it. Every formula in the box counts rows 5 through 24 only, and nothing on screen marks where that block ends, so an invoice typed on row 25 is invisible to the counts and to the $ still owed total while the sheet still looks right. Add rows by right-clicking a row inside the block and choosing Insert — the ranges stretch on their own. If you do type below row 24, widen the
$5:$24ranges in the three box formulas to match and drag the Days outstanding and Flag formulas down into the new rows. - The sheet ships with the numbers already saved in it, so a phone preview shows real figures; they recalculate as soon as you type in it.
The one thing
Do this this week
Build the list once. Open the tool below — or a blank sheet — and put every unpaid invoice on it: customer, job, amount, the date you invoiced, oldest at the top. That single sorted list, sitting in front of you, is the meeting; the fifteen minutes next week is just reading it.
Take it with you
One email unlocks this and every other sheet and card on the site. The plays stay free.
Same fire
Owed money you can't collect
- M6-01the money meeting — you’re here
- M6-02one name on the money
- M6-03the call you're dodging
- M6-09the lien
- M6-18what's on the page before they tear off
Fixed this?
If you're always chasing money, look at what the jobs were priced at — owed money and thin margins usually ride together.
The fire right behind it is usually Jobs sell but the profit isn't there.