# Work in progress (WIP)

Jobs started and unfinished on closing day: costs spent, nothing billed yet.

In any trade that quotes a job and finishes it weeks later, this is the largest number nobody negotiates. The seller spent the materials and the labor, the customer pays you, and whoever wrote the [purchase agreement](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/purchase-agreement) decides who keeps that cash. Get a job-by-job schedule with cost incurred and amount billed, and settle it inside the [working-capital peg](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/working-capital-peg) rather than as a side letter. Treat a seller who cannot produce the schedule as a seller whose books do not track it.

In numbers: A roofing company with $480,000 of started-and-unbilled jobs at closing is handing over roughly 12% of a $4M purchase price in value or in cost, depending entirely on who the agreement says owns it.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/work-in-progress
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt