Posts on construction accounting.
Construction accounting is structurally different from accounting in any other industry — 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.
How to build a schedule of values that gets your pay apps approved.
The schedule of values is the billing backbone of every commercial project — set once near contract signing, then billed against for the life of the job. How many lines to use, how to weight them, mobilization and stored materials, and the five SOV mistakes that stall payment.
WIP schedules and over/under billing: the report your bank actually reads.
The WIP schedule is the one report where operational truth and financial truth have to agree — and the one your bank and surety read first. Column by column: percent-complete revenue, over/under billing, profit fade, and why the hand-built Monday WIP is stale by Wednesday.
Signs you've outgrown QuickBooks and Excel for construction.
QuickBooks plus Excel is a rational stack — until the day it isn't. Seven concrete signs a commercial contractor has crossed the line, from job costing that lives in exports to the workbook only one person understands, and an honest look at what switching actually involves.
The month-end close for GCs: a working checklist.
A working close checklist for mid-market GCs — cutoffs, owner billing, AP and committed costs, retention both directions, waiver coverage, forecasts, and the WIP — plus the honest diagnosis of why close takes ten days at firms where it should take three.
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 generates an equivalent pay-app package from your own schedule of values. The forms themselves are copyrighted AIA documents; AOS is not affiliated with the AIA and does not supply AIA forms.
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.