Posts on construction accounting.
Construction accounting is structurally different from accounting in any other industry — AIA pay applications, retention coupled to lien waivers, cost coding that lives across estimating, PM, and the GL, and approval chains that span field, project, and accounting tiers. These posts cover the foundational workflows for mid-market commercial subs and GCs.
AIA G702 and G703 for subcontractors: a working guide.
The AIA G702 (Application and Certificate for Payment) and G703 (Continuation Sheet) are the standard pay-application forms used on most commercial construction projects in the United States. This is a working guide for subcontractors: what the forms are, what every line means, how to fill them in without errors, the common mistakes that delay payment, and how AOS automates the entire flow.
Construction retention rollforward by GC: a working guide for sub accounting.
Retention is the single largest line on most subcontractor balance sheets that nobody can produce a clean report on. The dollars are owed, the GCs know they're owed, and yet at closeout the numbers don't match and the negotiation almost always favors the side with better records. This is a working guide for sub accountants on how to roll retention forward cleanly — what to track, where it gets lost today, the state-by-state release triggers most subs miss, and how AOS handles the whole thing on one record.
Construction lien waivers explained: a state-by-state guide for subcontractors and GCs.
Construction lien waivers are simple in concept and complicated in practice. Every state has its own statutory landscape, several states mandate prescribed forms, notarization rules vary, and a waiver for the wrong amount or on the wrong form can void a sub's payment or expose a GC to lien liability. This is a working guide to the four types of lien waivers, the state-by-state form requirements every commercial sub and GC needs to know, the common mistakes that delay payment, and how AOS handles all 51 jurisdictions automatically.
Construction AP automation and tiered approval for mid-market GCs.
Accounts payable in commercial construction is structurally different from AP in any other industry. Tiered approval chains, lien-waiver coupling, three-way matching against the sub's pay app and the project's budget, retention math, and pay-when-paid statutory protections all live inside what would otherwise be a routine 'pay the bill' workflow. This is a guide for mid-market GC accountants and controllers on how construction AP actually has to work, what most GCs run today, and how AOS automates the chain end-to-end.
Construction cost coding and chart-of-accounts decisions for mid-market firms.
Cost coding is the most consequential foundational decision in a commercial construction firm's accounting setup, and it's the decision most often made by accident — inherited from the predecessor controller's 2014 setup, copied from the GC down the street, or matched to the estimator's spreadsheet templates from a prior firm. This is a working guide for mid-market commercial subs and GCs on how cost coding should be designed, why cost-code drift across systems is the root cause of pay-app reconciliation pain, and how to think about restructuring without breaking the historical record.