Risk & underwriting

Contractor limits belong to the portfolio, not the project

A per-project cap is trivially defeated by taking more projects.

July 4, 2026  ·  The Renny team

Most draw controls are expressed per project: a contractor may have some amount of unpaid completed work outstanding on a job before the next draw is gated. It is easy to implement and easy to explain, and it does not control the exposure it appears to control.

A contractor at their limit on one project simply has another project. The cap is per job; the risk is per business. Ten jobs at a modest per-project limit is a meaningful concentration to a single counterparty, and nothing in a per-project control notices.

What the exposure actually is

The right unit is the contractor's total unpaid completed work across every project on your book. That is the amount at risk if the business fails tomorrow: work you have funded that nobody will now finish, and work completed that you have not yet funded but are contractually exposed to.

Expressed that way, the control becomes a single number per contractor, checked at every draw across every project.

And it should not be fixed at approval

A limit set at onboarding reflects a business as it appeared before it had done any work with you. The evidence that should actually drive it accumulates afterwards: whether licenses stay current, whether disputes get raised and how they resolve, whether scopes hold or grow, how long they have been on the platform without incident.

A limit fixed at approval measures how a contractor looked on their best day. A limit revisited on a schedule measures how they behave.

So the limit should be reviewed on a cadence, recomputed from the record already held rather than from a fresh questionnaire, and adjustable in both directions. A contractor who documents cleanly for a year should be able to earn a larger limit. That is also the mechanism that makes the control acceptable to the contractor rather than merely imposed on them.

The implementation detail that matters

The limit has to be enforced at the moment of the draw, not surfaced in a review. If it is a report, a contractor can exceed it for however long the reporting cycle is. If it is a refusal at the point of authorization, they cannot exceed it at all.