If you're doing commercial work and billing general contractors on a schedule of values, you already know what AIA G702/G703 pay applications are. You also probably know how long they take to put together — and how easy it is to make an error that gets the whole application kicked back.
For most specialty contractors, AIA billing is one of the most painful administrative tasks in the business. It happens on a fixed cycle, it can't be skipped, and every delay in submitting means a delay in getting paid. Here's what the manual process looks like and how to automate most of it using your JobTread data.
What the manual process actually involves
A G702/G703 pay application requires you to track, for every line item in the schedule of values:
- The original scheduled value for that line item
- What was billed in all previous periods
- What you're billing in the current period
- Materials stored on site but not yet installed
- Total completed and stored to date
- Percent complete
- Balance to finish
- Any retainage withheld
Then the G702 summarizes all of that into a single application for payment, signed and notarized in many cases. Every line item has to be correct and consistent with previous applications — a discrepancy in the running totals gets the application rejected.
"The problem isn't just that it takes time. It's that if you get it wrong, you don't get paid on time. And on commercial jobs, payment timing is everything."
Doing this manually means pulling your schedule of values from one place, your previous billing history from another, your current period work from JobTread, and assembling it all into a formatted document the GC will accept. For a contractor with five commercial jobs billing on the same monthly cycle, that's a full day of administrative work every month.
Where JobTread fits in
JobTread tracks all the data you need to generate an AIA pay application — the contract value, the cost codes and line items, what's been invoiced, what's been completed. The problem is that JobTread doesn't generate G702/G703 forms natively. The data is there, but the output isn't.
That's the gap the AIA billing tool fills. It connects to the JobTread API, pulls the relevant job data, and generates a properly formatted G702/G703 document ready to submit to the GC.
How the automated workflow works
The tool walks through the billing in a structured flow:
- Select the job. Pull up any commercial job in JobTread with a defined schedule of values.
- Set the billing period. Enter the start and end dates for the current application period.
- Review the schedule of values. The tool pulls your line items from JobTread and shows the running totals from all previous periods — what's been billed, what's complete, what retainage has been withheld.
- Enter current period work. For each line item, enter what was completed this period, any materials stored, and any changes. The tool calculates percent complete and balance to finish automatically.
- Generate the document. The tool outputs a formatted G702/G703 pay application and continuation sheet, populated with all the correct values and formatted to AIA standards.
The whole process takes minutes instead of 30-60 minutes per application. And because the tool carries forward the previous period totals automatically, the running calculations are always consistent — no more discrepancies that get applications kicked back.
What accurate AIA billing does for cash flow
Commercial contractors live and die on payment timing. General contractors pay on a schedule, and your application has to be submitted on time, correctly, to get on that schedule. An application that gets kicked back for errors or omissions puts you a full payment cycle behind.
Beyond just getting paid on time, accurate AIA billing affects your job costing. When your G702/G703 accurately reflects what's been earned versus what's been billed, you can see your true earned value position — how much you've earned on a job relative to how much cash has actually come in. That's the number that tells you whether you're financing your GC or whether you're in a healthy billing position.
Most specialty contractors I talk to don't track earned value at all. They just know what they've invoiced and what they've collected. Accurate AIA billing, tracked in JobTread, gives you the intermediate number that connects those two.
Who this is for
This tool makes the most sense for specialty contractors who:
- Do commercial work billing on a schedule of values to a GC or owner
- Have multiple commercial jobs billing on the same monthly cycle
- Have experienced applications being kicked back for formatting or calculation errors
- Are spending more than an hour per application on assembly and formatting
If you only have one or two commercial jobs and they're simple, the manual process may be manageable. But at three or more commercial jobs billing simultaneously, the time savings and error reduction justify the build almost immediately.
The connection to your broader billing workflow
The AIA billing tool is most powerful when it's connected to the rest of your ops platform. When vendor invoice processing is automated, your cost data in JobTread is current — which means your percent complete calculations and earned value numbers in the pay application are based on accurate cost data, not estimates. When job costing is live, you know before you submit whether the billing period's revenue is tracking with your costs.
Used in isolation, the AIA tool saves time and reduces errors. Used as part of a connected ops platform, it becomes part of a financial visibility loop that keeps the whole business running cleaner.
Still building AIA pay apps by hand?
I build AIA G702/G703 generators for specialty contractors on JobTread — $3,000, delivered in 2-3 weeks. If you're doing commercial work and the billing assembly is eating your time, let's talk.