Last updated September 2026. This is general information about how businesses in these industries get paid. It is not legal, tax or financial advice for your business.
Two of the largest groups of businesses we fund look like they have nothing to do with each other.
On one side, specialty trades. Electrical, drainage, cabinetry and flooring, soffit and siding, garages. On the other, care businesses. Home care, health services, round the clock care, treatment centers.
Different trucks, different licenses, different customers. Same problem. And the problem is not sales, which is the part that trips people up when they go looking for money.
The money leaves on your calendar and arrives on somebody else's
Start with what goes out.
Construction pays its people weekly more than any other industry in the country. 65.4% of construction establishments run a weekly pay period, against a private sector average of 27.0%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two thirds of the industry is writing payroll every seven days.
Care businesses are mostly on a two week cycle. In education and health services, 63.6% pay biweekly. Slower than a trade, still faster than the money comes back.
Now look at what comes in.
A May 2026 survey of 492 construction finance and operations people found that 92% had floated payroll while waiting to get paid, and 28% were doing it most months. 43% wait more than 90 days for final payment and retainage. Close to one in five wait six months or more. That survey was published by a company that sells to contractors, so read it as an industry temperature check rather than a government statistic. It matches what we see in the files.
On the care side the timing is written into federal regulation. The Medicaid standard at 42 CFR 447.45 requires states to pay 90% of clean practitioner claims within 30 days and 99% within 90 days. Claims outside that category have to be paid within 12 months. Read that again. The federal standard that is supposed to protect you permits one in a hundred clean claims to take a full quarter, and some claim types to take a year.
Nobody is doing anything wrong in either picture. That is the point. This is the system working as designed.
Why the bank cannot help with this particular problem
The reason is three fold.
First, the gap is structural, so it never closes. A business with a cash timing problem does not grow out of it. It grows into a bigger version of it. Win a larger job and the payroll goes up this month while the receivable goes out further. Your best quarter is your tightest quarter. Most owners in these industries have felt that and assumed it meant they had done something wrong.
Secondly, there is nothing to pledge. A bank underwrites against collateral. A home care agency's assets are people, a lease and a scheduling system. A specialty trade's assets are a truck and tools that are usually financed already. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has said as much about home health in its own report to Congress, noting these agencies are not capital intensive and do not require extensive physical infrastructure. That is a compliment about the business model and a problem at the credit committee.
Lastly, the balance sheet is the wrong document. It shows a snapshot on one day. It does not show that the $180,000 sitting in receivables is a signed pay application with a general contractor who has paid you eleven times, or a Medicaid claim that is clean and simply queued. Those two facts are the entire credit story and neither one appears on the page the bank is reading.
What we look at instead
We are a funder. We make money when a business takes funding from us, and you should weigh what follows with that in mind.
What we actually read is the bank statements, line by line. Not the score first. The statements tell us four things a score never will.
How the money moves. Deposits every week from six customers is a different business from one deposit a month from one customer, even when the annual number is identical.
Why the slow month was slow. A March that dropped 40% because a general contractor sat on two pay applications is not the same as a March that dropped 40% because the phone stopped ringing. A model cannot tell those apart. A person reads the deposits on either side of it and can.
Whether the receivable is real. Signed pay application, submitted claim, executed contract. Timing risk and collection risk are different risks and they deserve different answers.
Whether you have paid anybody back before. Repayment history is one of the strongest things in a file. It is also the thing most automated models weigh the least, because it sits in your bank statements rather than in your credit report.
Our credit floor is 550. Most of the category stops reading at 650. That difference is not generosity, it is what happens when a person reads the whole file instead of sorting on one field.
What I would tell an owner in either industry
The hardest truth first. If you are floating payroll out of your operating account every month, you do not have a cash flow problem you can budget your way out of. You have a timing mismatch, and the only fixes are to change your payment terms, which you usually cannot, or to bridge the gap on purpose instead of by accident. Doing it by accident is what quietly eats a good year.
The strategic play. Get funded when the pipeline is full, not when the account is empty. An owner who applies with three signed jobs and ninety days of clean deposits gets a different answer than the same owner applying six weeks later with an overdraft. Same business. Different file.
And the reassurance. The math works for these businesses. That is why they are two of the largest groups in our book. A business that gets paid slowly but reliably is a good credit. It is just not a good credit by a bank's definition, and those are not the same thing.
The bottom line
You are not bad at running your business because you are short in week three. You are in an industry that pays people weekly and gets paid quarterly, and no amount of discipline compresses ninety days into seven.
If that is your situation, send us three months of bank statements. A person reads every file here, and most applications get a decision the same day. If the answer is no, you will hear why, in a sentence you can do something with.