I have run the 13-week document at mining services groups across copper, gold, iron ore, and aggregates, and the lesson every time is the same: cash is not smooth, the receivables timing is operator-specific, and the equipment-finance line is the largest fixed weekly outflow in the document. Most services groups arrive with a 13-week spreadsheet that was built for a manufacturing business — ratable revenue smoothed into weekly buckets, a blended AR balance, an equipment-finance line that sits at one number. None of that survives the first month of a real cycle. The template I describe below is the one we hand to a new finance team at the explorer-to-producer or services-scale-up transition, and it is built around three facts: milestone billing creates lumpy cash events, the top five operators concentrate 60–85% of the book, and equipment finance falls due whether the trucks are turning or stacked. Copper is sitting above $12,000 per metric ton and iron ore has rallied 85% off the September 2024 low; tailwind is real, but contractor working capital is the line that wins or loses the cycle inside the tailwind, and the document below is what makes the working capital legible.
01 Why mining services cash is event-driven
A mining services group does not have ratable revenue. Crews mobilise to site on a project schedule; the project bills on milestone or on monthly progress-claim against verified quantities; the operator pays on net-30 nominal but effectively net-45 to net-90 once invoice approval and payment-run cadence are factored in; the project demobs on a date that slips. Each of these is a cash event, not a smoothed recognition. The 13-week document has to surface each event as a column on the timeline, with named counterparty and confidence rating, and the founder or CFO has to walk the events weekly. Build the template as a project tracker first and a financial schedule second — that ordering is the whole difference between a document that catches problems three weeks early and a document that catches them three weeks late.
Effective DSO is the number that surprises every new mining services CFO. On unit-rate contracts — open-cut drill and blast, load and haul, grade control — nominal terms run 30 to 45 days but the verification step takes one to two weeks and the operator AP cycle runs another 30 from approval, so service-delivery-to-cash lands at 45 to 70 days. On milestone-based EPC or EPCM project services, the band runs 60 to 90 days, and the 5 to 10 percent retention extends the effective cash-conversion window to 180 to 360 days. The template separates "billed but unapproved", "approved but unpaid", and "retention held" as three different aging buckets, because the cash treatment is different and the conversation with the operator is different in each.
The mining services cash document is not a forecast. It is a project tracker with cash dates attached, and the realistic-versus-contracted gap on the largest operator is the line you walk first every Monday.
Mobilisation and demobilisation cash deserve their own seat in the template. A new contract typically carries two to three months of negative free cash before progress claims start hitting the bank — equipment refurbishment, recruitment and travel, site infrastructure, bonds and bank guarantees, all front-loaded. Mobilisation fees are more commonly negotiated in 2024–26 than they were five years ago, but operators frequently net them against early progress claims rather than paying them outright, so the timing of the mob fee is the variable that matters more than the size. Demob fees are increasingly capped and offset against final claims and retention release; final cash on a wound-down contract typically arrives 3 to 12 months after demob, and the template carries the retention-release calendar as a discrete line so it does not vanish into a blended AR balance.
02 Receivables by counterparty, by milestone
In services groups in the $40M–$240M revenue band, the top five operators usually represent 60% to 85% of revenue. That concentration is not a risk to be diversified away in a 13-week document — it is the operating reality, and the template has to be built for it. We carry receivables not as a single AR line but as a counterparty-by-milestone schedule: each operator, each active project, each open milestone, the invoiced amount, the contracted payment date, the realistic payment date. The realistic-versus-contracted gap is the single most useful early-warning signal in the document. A two-week realistic-versus-contracted gap that widens to four weeks across two consecutive billing cycles is the conversation that needs to happen before the gap becomes a covenant event.
The Tier-1 majors — BHP, Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Glencore, Newmont, Fortescue, First Quantum — are reliable payers on undisputed invoices. The slow-pay we see is almost never a credit-quality problem with these counterparties; it is a process problem. Strict PO-match, coding, timesheet, and HSE sign-off gatekeeping means any mismatch moves an invoice to the next payment run, which adds 14 to 30 days to effective DSO. The template fixes this at the source: the milestone schedule carries the operator-specific invoice-quality checklist as a column, so the project administrator submits a clean invoice on the first attempt. The investment in clean submission is the single highest-ROI working-capital initiative we see at the explorer-to-producer transition.
Mid-tier producers and juniors are a different conversation. The receivable risk is real, not procedural. A mid-tier paying 30 days late three quarters in a row, with a deteriorating commodity environment, is a counterparty that needs an expected-credit-loss overlay in the cash document and a contracting conversation upstream. We have seen contractor groups carry $8M to $12M of receivables against a single junior counterparty that priced beautifully in the order book and never produced cash; the discipline of separating Tier-1 from mid-tier from junior in the template — not in revenue, but in cash confidence — is what surfaces this risk early. The companion read on this is our piece on the interim CFO playbook for a mining services group in a down cycle at /blog/interim-cfo-mining-services-down-cycle/, which works the counterparty-restructuring conversation from the operations side.
The retention ledger as a separate document
Retention is held at 5 to 10 percent of progress claims, released half at practical completion and half at the end of the defects-liability period. On a $40M three-year contract, retention can run $2M to $4M at peak and is sitting on the balance sheet as a non-cash receivable that the document needs to track separately. We build the retention ledger as a discrete schedule with the contracted release dates, the realistic release dates, and the defects-liability expiry calendar, and we reconcile it monthly. Retention is often the line that funds the final wind-down of a contract — if it is not visible in the cash document, the working-capital squeeze at demob shows up four weeks late.
03 Equipment finance as a fixed weekly outflow
Equipment finance — leases, loans, equipment-backed credit lines, hire purchase, chattel mortgage — is the largest fixed weekly cash outflow in most mining services groups, and the line that most often becomes uncovered in a trough. Haul trucks, underground loaders, drill rigs, and support fleets typically run on five-to-seven-year amortisation with 10 to 30 percent balloons at maturity. Loan-to-value at origination sits at 70 to 85 percent for newer mainstream assets; the captives (Caterpillar Financial, Komatsu Financial, Sandvik, Epiroc) underwrite residual value more aggressively than banks, the banks underwrite the whole-business credit more aggressively than captives, and a typical mid-size mining services group has both in the stack.
The template models every facility individually, not as a blended interest-and-principal line. Each row carries the lender, the asset class, the contracted payment date, the principal-and-interest amount, the remaining term, the balloon date, the balloon amount, and the prepayment penalty if pre-paid in the next 12 months. Balloon dates are flagged 90 days out and the refinancing conversation starts then — not 30 days out, when the lender has zero incentive to flex. The prepayment penalty is surfaced before it becomes a surprise in a restructuring conversation, because restructuring lenders price off the contractual prepay, not the economic cost of holding the asset.
Covenant calendar embedded in the same document
Asset-finance facilities carry covenants — net debt to EBITDA, interest cover, DSCR, minimum cash balance — and the test dates are usually quarterly. The template embeds the covenant test date and the projected covenant headroom into the cash schedule at the right week, so the document tells you whether the September quarterly test is going to pass three months ahead of when the lender finds out. Asset-level covenants — insurance, usage and hours reporting, no disposal without consent, negative pledge — are reported separately, but the financial covenant calendar lives inside the 13-week document. The week that a covenant breach is projected is the week the lender conversation has to start, not the week the test fails.
Stack-and-store as a cash decision, framed correctly
A stack-and-store decision on idle iron releases the equipment-finance line only if the facility is closed out — paid down, asset sold or returned, lease terminated. Most often that is not what happens. Stacking a haul truck on care-and-maintenance still carries the finance payment; what changes is that the operating expense (operator wage, diesel, scheduled service) stops, and a much smaller preservation cost (yard, periodic inspection, fluid management, engine preservation) starts. The cash impact of stack-and-store is real but smaller than the impact of disposal. The template makes the two scenarios visible side by side so the strategic conversation — will we need this asset within 12 months — happens separately from the cash conversation.
The strategic cost of disposal is the part most groups underweight. OEM new-truck lead times remained 12 to 24 months on some haul-truck models through 2024–26; selling a usable asset at the bottom of the cycle and trying to replace it 12 months later at the top is one of the most expensive operational mistakes a mining services group can make. Emeco, Macmahon, Perenti, and NRW Holdings all frame fleet decisions around the same calculus — preserve optionality where redeployment is plausible, dispose only where the asset is end-of-life or the working-capital pressure is acute enough to force the issue. The template surfaces the inputs; the executive decision stays with the operator.
04 Commodity context the document has to absorb
Mining services revenue is downstream of operator capex, and operator capex is downstream of the commodity curve. The May 2026 read is supportive on the metals side and challenging on the input-cost side, and the 13-week document has to absorb both at once. Copper is sitting at $12,529 per metric ton (FRED PCOPPUSDM, March 2026), up roughly 50% from the January 2024 baseline. Iron ore is at index 173.8 (FRED IQ12260, April 2026), up 85% from the September 2024 trough. Operator capex commitments into 2026 are firm on those tailwinds; the milestone column in the template is biased to upside on volume.
The input-cost side is the offset. WTI crude oil ran between $95 and $112 per barrel through April and May 2026, with US wholesale diesel stepping up from $3.48 per gallon in early January 2026 to $5.60 by mid-May — roughly +60% in five months. Diesel is the single largest unit-rate input for haul-and-load contractors, and every contract without a 30-day diesel rider creates a 30-to-60-day working-capital drag as the contractor absorbs the input cost before the pass-through indexing catches up. The template carries diesel pass-through lag as an explicit working-capital line, separated from operating-margin compression so the conversation with the operator is structured around timing rather than margin.
Copper and iron ore are running. Diesel is running too. The cash document has to hold both at once — the operator capex tailwind in the milestone column, the diesel pass-through lag in the working-capital line.
For groups exposed to gold and base metals, the supportive commodity context lengthens the planning horizon. We are seeing more groups extend the cash document from 13 weeks to 26 weeks where order-book visibility supports it (we cover this in the next section). For groups in single-commodity exposure — pure thermal coal, niche specialty — the document stays at 13 weeks and the scenario layer becomes more important than the base case.
05 The Monday review
The template is updated weekly with project-level actuals: milestones billed, milestones paid, retention released, slip days on each. It is reviewed every Monday by the CFO, the head of operations, and the senior project manager for the largest active project. The discipline is that the same three people meet at the same time every week, with the same document on the screen, and walk the same five lines. The cadence is more important than the spreadsheet quality — a mediocre document reviewed every Monday produces better decisions than a perfect document reviewed every quarter.
The decisions made at the Monday review are operational, not financial. Which operators to escalate on payment — whose realistic-versus-contracted gap has widened past tolerance. Which milestones to accelerate billing on — whose project administrator has been slow with the verification step. Whether to advance or defer a mobilisation — whose contract start date is at risk because of working-capital tightness in the next four weeks. Whether the equipment-finance restructuring conversation needs to start — which facility is approaching a balloon with insufficient refinancing capacity. The cash document surfaces the five questions; the meeting answers them.
- Is the receivables line broken out by operator and milestone, or running as a blended AR balance? A blended balance hides the operator-specific slow-pay that you actually need to manage.
- Are equipment-finance payments mapped on the timeline with balloon dates flagged 90 days out, prepayment penalties surfaced, and covenant test dates embedded at the right week?
- Is the retention ledger maintained separately, with contracted release dates, realistic release dates, and defects-liability expiry calendar reconciled monthly?
- When does the top operator's realistic-versus-contracted gap become a covenant-relevant event, and have you modelled the trigger week in the scenario layer?
- Is the diesel pass-through lag carried as an explicit working-capital line, separated from operating-margin compression, so the conversation with the operator is structured around timing?
Most mining services groups we walk into have answered "no" or "partially" to four of the five questions above when we arrive. The 12-week onboarding is the work of moving them to "yes" on all five. The CFO playbook on capex and working-capital discipline for junior producers at /blog/fractional-cfo-junior-mining-producers/ covers the producer-side companion to this — same disciplines, different counterparty.
06 The scenario layer the base case needs
A 13-week cash document with only a base case is a working assumption dressed up as a forecast. The scenario layer is what makes the document operationally useful. We run three scenarios alongside the base case: a slow-pay scenario where top-five operator effective DSO drifts 15 to 20 days; a utilisation scenario where one major contract demobs 90 days earlier than planned; and a stack-and-store scenario where one fleet idles for two quarters. Each scenario runs forward from the same week-zero and surfaces the weekly cash trough in a discrete column.
The slow-pay scenario is the one that matters most in 2024–26. McGrathNicol's construction and engineering working-capital data shows DSO already up 1.8 days year-over-year in the construction adjacent cohort, and DPO up 9.1 days — half the sample with a funding gap. That dataset is not mining-specific but it tracks closely. In mining services down-cycle quarters we expect contractor DSO to drift from 45–55 days to 60–70 days on production contracts, and from 60–80 days to 70–90+ days on EPC and EPCM services. The slow-pay scenario carries the 15-to-20-day drift, the corresponding cash trough, and the trigger week for the lender conversation.
The utilisation scenario captures the demob risk that mining services groups underweight. An operator capex review, a feasibility re-look, a permitting delay, or a commodity reversal can move a demob date forward by 60 to 120 days; the cash event is the demob fee plus retention timing minus the revenue that disappears from week 4 onwards. The scenario does not need to be precise about which contract — it needs to be precise about the cash shape of one demob hitting the document at four points in the next 13 weeks. The fractional CFO playbook for capital allocation in mining at /blog/mining-capex-allocation/ frames the operator-side decisions that drive this scenario.
07 When the document extends to 26 weeks
For services groups inside a long-term framework agreement — a five-year contract mining contract with a Tier-1 major, a three-year underground production services agreement, a take-or-pay style arrangement with locked-in volumes — the document extends to 26 weeks. The visibility on the order book supports the longer horizon, the equipment-finance balloon calendar typically wants the longer horizon, and the lender covenant calendar usually expects the longer horizon. The 26-week document is structurally the same as the 13-week document; the rows are identical; the columns extend.
For project-shop groups taking project-by-project work — exploration drilling services, ad hoc earthworks, environmental remediation packages — the document stays at 13 weeks because the order-book visibility does not reliably extend further. The discipline is the same; the horizon adapts to the visibility the order book actually provides. The mistake is to run a 26-week document on 13 weeks of visibility — the back half becomes wishful, the cadence weakens, and the document loses its operational discipline.
Companion templates: the 13-week template for oil and gas services groups at /blog/13-week-cash-flow-template-oil-gas-services/ runs the same architecture against day-rate compression and operator slow-pay in upstream services — same Monday-review cadence, different cash mechanics. The mining-services M&A multiples read at /blog/mining-services-ma-multiples-q2-2026/ frames what the document looks like to a buyer in a sale process.
08 What to do in the first 90 days
For a new finance team — or an existing team that has inherited a 13-week document that is not earning its keep — the work sequences in three phases over the first 90 days.
- 01 Weeks 1–4: Rebuild the receivables and retention ledgers. Pull the counterparty-by-milestone schedule for every active project. Reconcile invoiced, approved, paid, and retention-held for the top five operators. Surface the realistic-versus-contracted gap by operator. The first month is data integrity work, not analysis — the document is only as good as the underlying ledger. Most groups have this data scattered across project administrators, the ERP, and the operations spreadsheet; consolidating into one sheet is the prerequisite for everything that follows.
- 02 Weeks 5–8: Build the equipment-finance facility schedule and the covenant calendar. Pull every lease, loan, hire-purchase, and chattel-mortgage facility into one schedule with lender, asset, payment date, balloon date, prepayment penalty, and covenant test calendar. Flag the next balloon 90 days out. Project covenant headroom at each test date through the 13 weeks. By week 8, you have a complete picture of fixed equipment-finance cash, and the lender conversations needed in the next six months are identified.
- 03 Weeks 9–12: Establish the Monday review and the scenario layer. Hard-wire the cadence — CFO, head of operations, senior PM, same time every Monday, same document. Build the three scenarios (slow-pay drift, utilisation demob, stack-and-store) alongside the base case. By the end of week 12 the document is operational: it surfaces the right questions, the right people are walking it weekly, and the lender and operator conversations the document predicts have already started.
Most groups can land this in 90 days with a fractional CFO on the build and a part-time finance manager on the maintenance. The maintenance cost after build is approximately one day per week of finance-manager time and 90 minutes of CFO time on Monday. That is a low recurring cost for the operational visibility that the document produces, and it is the single highest-leverage finance discipline we install at the services-scale-up or explorer-to-producer transition.
Frequently asked questions
Why a 13-week cash flow forecast specifically for mining services groups, instead of a generic template?
What is the typical effective DSO for mining services contractors in 2024–2026?
How concentrated is the top-five operator base in mining services groups, and how should the cash template handle it?
How does the template model equipment finance — by line item or aggregated?
When should a mining services group trigger a stack-and-store decision versus dispose of equipment?
When does the document extend from 13 weeks to 26 weeks?
What is the right cadence for reviewing the 13-week cash document, and who attends?
Working capital and DSO benchmarks: McGrathNicol Construction & Engineering Working Capital Report 2024; Allianz Trade 2025 Global DSO & Working Capital Report; KPMG Working Capital Trends in the US Market 2025.
Mining services structure and counterparty context: McKinsey "How to navigate mining's cash-flow conundrum"; PwC Productivity and cost management in the mining industry; EY Risks and opportunities for mining and metals 2026; White & Case Mining & metals 2026.
Equipment finance structures: ELFA industry overview; Caterpillar Financial mining program disclosures; Volvo CE balloon-payment commentary; JPMorgan equipment finance practice notes.
Commodity context: FRED series PCOPPUSDM (Global Price of Copper, monthly), IQ12260 (Global Iron Ore index), DCOILWTICO (WTI Crude Oil), GASDESW (US No. 2 Diesel wholesale), observations retrieved 24 May 2026.
Full source list at content-pipeline/research/13-week-cash-flow-template-mining-services/sources.md in the Putra & Co content pipeline. Template version 2026.2 (mining services variant).