Millwork Deposits and Progress Billing: A Sample Scenario

This is a hypothetical example created to illustrate how this service could work for a business with these needs. It is not a description of an actual client engagement. The company is invented and every figure below is an illustrative assumption, not a measured result. Assume the following scenario. Ridgeline takes a 50% deposit on custom orders that routinely exceed $40,000, then bills the balance four to six months later when the work ships. Two things would typically be breaking. Large deposits were declining against a per-transaction cap nobody had revisited since the account opened, and every general contractor paying by commercial card was downgrading to non-qualified because the deposit posted as a single undescribed amount. An example approach would be to raise the limits through underwriting, move payment collection out of a standalone virtual terminal and into the ERP, and map the line-item fields required for Level 3.

• Deposits above the old cap would clear.

• Commercial card payments could qualify at Level 3 where the customer's card supports it.

• Open deposits would reconcile to the ERP rather than a spreadsheet.

• Card numbers would no longer be held on paper anywhere in the building.

Large deposits declining at the cap, and every commercial card payment downgrading to non-qualified interchange.

• Twelve months of statements normalized to a single interchange-plus baseline.
• Transaction-level review of every declined deposit over $20,000.
• Field-by-field comparison of what the ERP held against what Level 3 requires.
• Review of how balances were collected on jobs older than 120 days.