AIA Progress Billing (G702/G703)

AIA progress billing is the standard method for billing a construction job in installments as work is completed, rather than one lump sum at the end. It's built around two American Institute of Architects (AIA) forms — G702 (Application and Certificate for Payment, the summary) and G703 (Continuation Sheet, the line-item breakdown of work completed to date, by cost code, against the total contract value). Together they're often just called "AIA billing" or "a pay app."

Why progress billing is more involved than a regular invoice

A regular invoice bills for something delivered. A progress bill has to show, cost code by cost code, how much of the total contract value has been completed to date, how much was billed in prior periods, how much retainage is being withheld, and what's left to bill — all reconciled against a budget that itself may have changed through change orders. Get the math wrong on a G703 and either the contractor is under-billing for real completed work, or the owner is overpaying against what's actually done.

What real AIA billing support requires

The G703's cost-code breakdown has to track against the job's actual budget, not a spreadsheet built separately for billing purposes. Retainage has to withhold and later release correctly per the contract terms. And change orders approved during the job need to flow into the billed contract value automatically, not require the pay app to be rebuilt by hand every time the scope changes.

How PoPs Suite handles it

Native progress billing — G702/G703, retainage, lien waivers — runs directly inside PoPs Project Tracker, against the same budget a won bid became in the first place, so a pay app reflects real job data instead of a parallel billing spreadsheet. Change orders approved in the same system update that budget automatically, so the billed contract value stays current without a manual reconciliation step. On the accounting side, PoPs Ledger supports progress billing as one of several real billing modes — alongside milestone and time-and-material — so how a job bills matches how it was actually contracted. For jobs with a Client Portal active, AIA pay-application status is visible to the client directly.