AIA G702/G703 Billing in Field PM

Why pay apps drift from the budget

The classic failure mode with AIA billing is that the schedule of values used for billing and the cost-coded budget used for job costing live in two different files — the SOV in a spreadsheet someone updates monthly, the budget in the job costing system. Every change order has to be added to both, every reclassification has to happen twice, and eventually the two drift: the amount billed under a line item doesn't match what the budget shows as complete, and nobody can say with confidence which number is right.

Field PM avoids that by building the pay application directly from the same <a href="/features/aia-billing">schedule of values</a> that underlies the project budget, so "percent complete" on the pay app and "percent complete" on the budget-vs-actual report are the same number by construction, not by coincidence.

Building the schedule of values once

The SOV is set up once per project — line items with scheduled values that typically mirror the cost code structure used for budgeting, so progress tracked for job costing and progress billed on the pay app are the same underlying data. As the job proceeds, each line's percent complete updates from field-reported progress (quantities installed, milestones hit) or a manual PM update where a percentage estimate is more appropriate than a quantity count, keeping the SOV current between billing cycles instead of requiring a scramble the week the application is due.

From SOV to G703 continuation sheet

• •Previous billing carried forward: prior period's billed amount pulls automatically from the last submitted application, so there's no re-keying and no risk of a mismatched running total.
• •This period's work: the new percent-complete on each SOV line converts to a dollar amount billed this period, based on the scheduled value.
• •Materials stored (if applicable): stored-but-not-installed materials can be tracked as their own column, per standard G703 practice, separate from work completed.
• •Retainage: calculated per the contract's retainage percentage, applied per line item or at the project level depending on how the contract is structured, and reduced automatically if the contract includes retainage reduction at a completion milestone.
• •Change orders: approved change orders (from the same change order log covered in Field PM's RFI/CO tracking) appear as their own SOV lines, or roll into existing ones, so a G703 that includes CO work reconciles against the approved CO log without a manual cross-check.

The G702 summary and certification

The G702 application summary rolls the G703 continuation sheet up into the standard AIA summary: original contract sum, net change by change orders, contract sum to date, total completed and stored to date, retainage, and the amount currently due. Because those numbers are generated from the same underlying SOV and change order data rather than typed in separately, the application is internally consistent by default — the kind of arithmetic error that gets a pay app kicked back by an architect or owner's rep (a G703 total that doesn't match the G702 summary line) isn't a manual step that can be gotten wrong.

The generated application is formatted for the standard AIA layout familiar to architects, owners, and their reps, so it can be signed, notarized if required, and submitted through the normal certification process without reformatting.

Why this matters beyond saving time

The time savings are real — turning a multi-hour spreadsheet exercise into a review-and-submit task — but the bigger value is that the number being billed and the number driving the project's budget-vs-actual are guaranteed to match, because they're the same data. That closes a gap that causes real problems: a contractor who bills ahead of what the budget shows as actually complete is financing the job on the owner's dime unknowingly, and a contractor who bills behind actual progress is sitting on cash flow they've already earned. Keeping billing and cost tracking on one shared SOV removes that daylight entirely.