Commercial success isn’t just about winning work, it is about knowing exactly what you’re owed. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in the specialist subcontracting sector, Richard Cooper BSc, Founder of ApplPay, explores why poor commercial visibility is quietly draining cashflow, increasing risk and leaving businesses exposed. He argues that gaining a clear, live view of payments, retentions and client exposure is no longer a luxury, but an essential foundation for financial resilience in today’s construction industry.
What is your business owed?
Not approximately. Not on one project. Across every live and completed contract, every application submitted, every certification received, every payment outstanding, every pound of retention held. What is your exact commercial position right now?
Having spent more than 25 years working in commercial and senior leadership roles within the specialist subcontractor sector, I’ve come to believe this is one of the industry’s most overlooked challenges that recurs across the sector regardless of how well businesses are run. It rarely makes the headlines because it’s not as dramatic as a contract dispute or as visible of a project delay. But, quietly in the background, it costs the industry more than almost anything else.
It is the simple loss of commercial visibility.
Ask any commercial manager, QS, finance department or business owner that deceptively simple question. In my experience, very few can answer with complete confidence. This isn’t because they are bad at their jobs, it’s actually quite the opposite. The commercial teams I have worked with over the years are, by far, some of the most capable, hardworking people in construction. The problem isn’t skill, it’s structure.
Where the visibility gets lost
Most specialist subcontractors are simultaneously running multiple live projects as well as having a pool of completed projects that money is owed on. Often these are across different clients, and sometimes different regions or branches. Each project generates its own stream of information; applications submitted, certifications received, payments due and received, split over contract works, materials on/off site, variations and, retentions held back pending completion or at the end of the defect’s liability period. Not to mention knowing the associated contractual dates for all these.
In a perfect world, all that information would sit in one place up to date and visible to everyone who needs it. In reality though, it’s usually scattered, a spreadsheet here, an email trail there, or somewhere in numerous project files. A note in someone’s inbox about a retention release date that quietly slips past without anyone noticing until a client query forces a scramble to piece the picture back together.
There is another dimension to this that is rarely discussed openly; the vulnerability that comes when commercial information lives in one person’s spreadsheet, usually the commercial manager or director. What happens when that person is on holiday, off sick or leaves the business? The answer, in many cases, is the full picture disappears with them, for at least a temporary period. Critical payment deadlines get missed. Retention release dates pass unnoticed. The business is left exposed because the information was never truly accessible to the business as a whole.
Does this happen because anyone is careless? No, the volume and complexity of running numerous live projects at once, sometimes with a team of QS’ makes it genuinely difficult to keep a single, accurate, up to date view using conventional tools. Spreadsheets don’t talk to email. Email does not talk to your accounting software. And as a business grows, whether it’s taking on more contracts, or complexity, opening regional offices, or being content with your current size. The gap between what is actually happening commercially and what anyone can see clearly, only widens.
In my experience this information is already held somewhere in a business. The challenge is being able to see it cleanly, across the whole business at any given moment.
For business owners and heads of commercial and finance, commercial visibility is about reducing uncertainty. Every important commercial decision, whether to continue working for a particular client, take on other projects with them or generally, recruit staff or invest in growth is influenced by confidence in the business’ commercial position. When that picture is fragmented across multiple systems and project files, decisions inevitably rely more on judgement than certainty. The clearer the commercial picture, the earlier businesses can identify risk and respond to changing circumstances.
What it actually cost
The financial impact of this is rarely tracked precisely, it’s hard to put a number on a cost you cannot see and that’s part of the problem. But speak to enough commercial teams and a pattern emerges. Applications that should have been chased a week earlier. Variations that were agreed verbally but never properly captured and paid. Retention that should have been released and reinvested into cashflow but instead sit forgotten for months, even years! Payment queries that take days to resolve simply because nobody can quickly produce a clear, accurate summary of what has actually happened on the contract.
Multiply that across every project a business is running, and the cumulative effect on cashflow can be significant, even before considering the simple cost of the hours spent by commercial teams trying to manually reconstruct a picture that should have been visible all along.
When the cost becomes catastrophic
The everyday financial drag of poor visibility is damaging enough. But the events of recent years have shown just how catastrophic the consequences can be when businesses are caught without a clear picture of their commercial exposure.
The collapse of ISG into administration in 2024 left hundreds of specialist subcontractors facing devastating losses. Many had multiple contracts with ISG, retention held across them, certified work that had not been paid for and applications waiting for certification too. For some businesses, the exposure ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
More recently, the collapse of Ardmore’s construction group into administration, triggered by the profound impact of a Building Liability Order judgement, left numerous specialist subcontractors once again facing significant exposure across multiple contracts. Unfortunately, commercial visibility would not have prevented these administrations, but it could have allowed businesses to understand their exposure much earlier and with much greater certainty.
It does however raise an important question, would they have acted sooner had they been able to see their full picture. Had they known every day exactly how much a single client owed them, how much retention the client was holding across the business and how concentrated their risk had become with one client, would they have made different decisions? Taken on less new work or had the difficult conversations with that client and pushed harder on outstanding payments. Or maybe spread their risk more deliberately across their portfolio?
Widely reported payment practices across parts of the construction and housebuilding sector has drawn significant media attention and, prompted serious questions about supply chain treatment which serves a further reminder that the risk is not confined to outright insolvencies. Slow payment, disputed certifications, and retention held beyond contractual terms are everyday realities for specialist subcontractors. Businesses that cannot see clearly what they are owed and when, are fundamentally less well equipped to identify and respond to those warning signs before they come serious problems.
These are exactly the questions that good commercial visibility allows businesses to answer quickly, and that fragmented spreadsheets, emails and projects files often make difficult to answer with confidence.
A problem the industry is finally taking seriously
Trade associations led in part by the FIS continue to push for payment reform and greater protection for specialist contractors across the supply chain. The work being done to improve payment practices, tackle late payment and increase transparency deserves recognition. Meaningful legislative change takes time, and I fully support this and the efforts being made.
But whilst the industry continues to push for long term change, specialist subcontractors also need practical solutions available now. Legislation alone will not solve the day-to-day operational challenge of visibility. The information businesses need to manage cashflow effectively is not to generate more information, it’s making sense of what already exists.
Businesses that build genuine commercial visibility into the way they operate will be far better positioned for whatever the final shape of payment reform turns out to be. Clearer visibility today means less disruption tomorrow, whatever changes come.
The foundation, not the report
Commercial visibility should not be viewed as another management report, nor is it a luxury or a nice-to-have. In a sector where client insolvencies can strike without warning and payment practices remain inconsistent across the supply chain, it is foundational to running a healthy, sustainable specialist subcontracting business for protecting cashflow, understanding client exposure, manage risk and make informed commercial decisions.
The industry’s commercial teams do not need to work harder. They need the right level of visibility to support the decisions they’re already making every day.
Payment reform will undoubtedly improve the industry over time. But, regardless of how legislation develops, businesses still need to understand their commercial position today.
After more than 25 years in the industry, the single most important piece of advice I could offer is this:
Know exactly what you are owed, by whom and when.
Everything else becomes easier from there.
“Richard Cooper BSc has spent over 25 years working within the specialist subcontracting sector in commercial and senior leadership roles across multi-million-pound businesses in the commercial, residential and refurbishment sectors. Specialising in the commercial management of drylining, firestopping, fibrous plasterwork, external cladding, re-cladding and fit out, Richard holds a BSc in Quantity Surveying and an ILM Level 3 Award in Leadership and Management. He is the founder of ApplPay, a member of the Finishes and Interiors Sector and works with trade associations to improve commercial visibility across the specialist contractor sector.”
