How construction CFOs prove bonding capacity in 5 minutes

Every construction CFO knows the routine. The surety asks for a current cash-position letter. The bid deadline is tomorrow. You open three bank portals, screenshot balances, paste them into a spreadsheet, annotate which accounts are "free and available" versus restricted, and email it to your broker. Two hours of a morning you did not have.

This post lays out what the surety actually wants, why the manual status quo fails construction CFOs specifically, and how to get the same artifact in five minutes using TreasuryFlow. If you run finance at a $5M to $50M general contractor or specialty trades firm with bonding obligations, this is for you.

What surety auditors actually want to see

A surety underwriter reviewing your bonding capacity cares about three numbers. Not one. Three.

1. Liquid operating cash. What you can spend tomorrow. Not payroll accounts two hours from hitting zero. Not accounts with minimum-balance covenants. Actual discretionary cash.
2. Restricted cash. Performance-bond escrow, retainage in separate accounts, cash reserved for job-specific bonds. The surety needs to know what's allocated so they don't double-count it toward new capacity.
3. Investment and reserve balances. Money-market funds, treasury-ladder accounts, and sweep accounts where CFOs park excess cash. These count toward your capacity but have different liquidity profiles.

A cash-position letter that only shows a single combined balance forces the surety to ask follow-up questions. Every round-trip costs a day. In a competitive bid, a day is a bid.

Why the manual version fails construction CFOs

Three structural reasons, not one of which is your fault:

1. Your cash is genuinely split across banks. Most contractors run an operating account at one bank, a payroll account at another, a performance-bond escrow at a third, and sometimes a separate bonding bank where the surety's own collateral sits. That is not mismanagement. That is how the industry works.
2. QuickBooks reflects what's been booked, not what's in the bank. A deposit in transit from Monday won't clear until Wednesday. A wire out went yesterday, but AP hasn't entered it yet. QuickBooks cash-on-hand is always a few days stale. The surety wants bank-side truth.
3. Spreadsheets don't tag account purpose. Column A shows balances. Column B shows bank names. Nothing in your workbook says "this $2.3M is bonding collateral, not operating." You know that. The surety doesn't. Until you annotate it manually. Every time.

The compounding cost is not the two hours. It's the psychological drag of knowing you'll have to do this again next month.

The CFOs we talk to don't dread the surety letter because it's hard. They dread it because it's the same hour of plumbing work, repeated forever, with no compounding.

The 5-minute workflow

TreasuryFlow solves this one specific problem. Here is what the workflow looks like.

Minute 1: Connect your banks via Plaid

Open TreasuryFlow. Click "Connect a bank." Choose your institution from 12,000+ supported. Log in with the bank's standard credentials. Plaid handles the OAuth, the read-only token, and the encryption. Repeat for every bank that holds cash for the business — operating, bonding, escrow, reserves.

Most CFOs have this part done in under a minute per bank. A contractor with four banks is looking at four minutes of total bank-connection time, once.

Minute 2: Tag each account's role

TreasuryFlow asks you what each connected account is for. The options:

• Operating — working cash for daily business
• Bonding — surety collateral, bonding-bank deposits
• Escrow — performance-bond escrow, retainage held aside
• Investment — money-market, treasury ladder, sweep
• Payroll — scheduled to hit zero on payroll days
• Trust — IOLTA, client funds, other fiduciary
• Reserve — buffer cash, emergency fund
• Other — anything else

Click-click. Your accounts now carry their purpose.

Minute 3: Review the auto-generated split

TreasuryFlow shows you a liquidity split: Liquid operating + available reserves / Restricted (bonding + escrow + trust) / Investment (MMF, treasury, sweep). The numbers come straight from your banks, updated daily. No spreadsheet assembly. No copy-paste.

Your total cash position. Your available-for-new-bonding number. Your restricted pool. Three numbers that are always current.

Minute 4: Export the surety-letter workbook

Click "Export to Excel." TreasuryFlow generates a workbook with:

• A cover page showing the three liquidity numbers as of today
• A per-account tab showing bank, account name, purpose tag, current balance, and 30-day activity
• A reconciliation note with the Plaid fetch timestamp and the sync status of each account

This is the artifact your broker can forward directly to the surety. No annotations required. No manual spreadsheet labor.

Minute 5: Send it

Attach the Excel file to an email. Copy the broker. Done.

A walkthrough in plain numbers

Consider a $40M general contractor we'll call the example firm. Four banks: a regional commercial bank for operating, a second regional bank for a bonding-collateral account required by the surety, a community bank for payroll, and a treasury-management firm for an MMF sweep.

Before TreasuryFlow, the CFO's morning surety-letter routine looked like this:

• Log into Bank A, screenshot operating balances from three sub-accounts
• Log into Bank B, pull the bonding-collateral balance and confirm no drift from the surety's minimum
• Log into Bank C, pull the payroll balance — careful not to overstate because a run is scheduled for Friday
• Log into the MMF portal, pull the current unit count × NAV
• Paste everything into a workbook with hand-typed labels
• Re-check the numbers because typos happen when you're tired
• Email the broker

Thirty-five minutes to an hour, depending on the day and how much caffeine.

After TreasuryFlow, the same CFO opens TreasuryFlow, clicks "Export," emails the workbook. Three minutes, end to end. The time savings aren't the point. The point is the CFO stops dreading the ask.

What TreasuryFlow is not

A surety filing tool. We don't submit bonds. We don't file work-in-progress schedules. We don't replace Sage 300 or Viewpoint. What we do is give you the live, sharable, bank-truth snapshot of where your cash actually is — so your brokers and sureties can do their jobs without a two-hour pause waiting on you.

Pricing

$399 per month, flat. Unlimited bank connections. Unlimited users on your account. 14-day free trial, no credit card. If you have a bonding bank, an operating bank, and an escrow, you are almost certainly in scope.

Frequently asked questions