Construction & Contractors Edition

Job costing, progress billing, and retainage for general contractors, subs, and remodelers. Tag your bills to jobs with cost codes and the cost-to-date report builds itself; bill the owner with a pay application that drafts the invoice net of retainage and prints a G702/G703-style PDF; release the withheld retainage when the job wraps.

Turning On the Edition

Included with the Pro tier and above — no add-on fee. The 🏗️ Construction entry appears in the top navigation when your license qualifies, and in the sidebar once your company has jobs (or a construction-sounding industry on file). On Starter? Settings → License Management.

Setting Up a Job

A job is one project under contract. Click + New Job and capture:

• Job name and customer — the owner you'll be billing.
• Job # — auto-assigned per year (JOB-2026-0001) or your own scheme.
• Contract amount — the frame every report compares against.
• Retainage % — what the owner withholds from each progress payment (default 10%).
• Site address and key dates.

The jobs list shows each job's contract, cost to date, billed to date, and retainage held — your portfolio at a glance.

Cost Codes

Cost codes categorize job spend the way estimators think: concrete, framing, electrical, equipment. Open the Cost Codes tab and click Load Starter Codes for a CSI-style starter list (General Conditions through Permits & Fees), then add your own. Each code carries a type — labor, material, subcontractor, equipment, or other.

Job Costing

The flow: enter vendor bills in Vendor Hub exactly as you always have, then open the job and click 💵 Tag Bill to Job — pick the bill and its cost code. Time entries can carry a job too. From there everything is automatic:

• Costs by Code on the job page: spend grouped by cost code with entry counts.
• Cost to date vs. billed to date with the margin between them — green when you're ahead, red when the job is underwater.
• Remaining to bill against the contract amount.

Pay Applications

Progress billing works the way owners and architects expect — a schedule of values with a line per work category. Click 🧾 New Pay App on the job:

1. Lines from your previous application appear with previously billed rolled forward automatically — you only type this period's numbers.
2. Enter this period (and any materials stored) per line. Billing a line past its scheduled value is rejected.
3. The footer computes live: work this period + stored, minus retainage at the job's percentage, equals the net due.
4. Submit. BizBooks Pro creates the pay application and drafts the invoice for the net amount — one line per SOV line, plus a visible "less retainage withheld" line — ready to review and send from the Invoice Center.

The G702/G703-Style PDF

Every pay application prints a landscape application-for-payment PDF: project header, the continuation-sheet table (scheduled value, previous applications, this period, materials stored, completed & stored to date, percent complete per line), totals, the retainage computation, current payment due, and signature lines for contractor and owner/architect. Reprint any prior application from the job's pay-app list.

Retainage

Each pay application withholds retainage at the job's percentage — a $30,000 billing period at 10% drafts a $27,000 invoice and adds $3,000 to the job's retainage held. The held balance accumulates across applications and shows on the jobs list and job detail, so the money the owner is sitting on never disappears from view.

Releasing Retainage

When the job completes and the owner approves release, click 🔓 Release Retainage. BizBooks Pro drafts the final invoice for the full held amount and closes retainage on the job — release can only happen once, and no further pay applications can post afterward. The job's billing story ends exactly where the contract said it would.

Subcontractor 1099s

Subs are vendors, and every bill you enter against them accrues to their 1099-NEC automatically. At year-end, Reports Studio → 1099 Summary totals each sub — the job-costing tags don't change the tax reporting, they just tell you which job the spend belonged to.