Send invoices for the portion of work you've completed — not the full contract amount. BizBooks Pro lets you bill incrementally against any estimate and tracks exactly what's been invoiced and what remains.
Try It FreeService businesses, contractors, and project-based firms rarely complete a job before they need to bill for it. A two-month renovation, a multi-phase software build, or a long-running consulting engagement all have the same problem: you're incurring costs continuously, but a single invoice at the end puts cash flow under enormous pressure.
Progress billing solves this by letting you draw down against an approved estimate as work advances. Create the estimate once, then issue invoices for any portion — 25% at kickoff, 50% at midpoint, and the remaining 25% at delivery, for example. BizBooks Pro tracks every draw against the estimate total so you always know how much has been billed, how much has been collected, and how much is still outstanding on the contract.
Build a detailed project estimate with line items, quantities, and pricing. The estimate becomes the billing baseline for all progress invoices.
When a billing milestone arrives, create a progress invoice against the estimate. Enter the percentage or dollar amount to bill — BizBooks Pro handles the rest.
The billing progress panel shows a running total of all draws — how much has been invoiced, collected, and how much contract value remains unbilled.
When the job is finished, bill the final balance — including any retained holdback if applicable. BizBooks Pro confirms when the estimate has been fully invoiced.
Invoice any portion of an estimate at any time. You're not locked into fixed milestones — bill the exact amount appropriate for each phase of work.
A clear billing summary shows you the contract value, total invoiced to date, amounts collected, and what's still waiting to be billed — all in one panel.
Construction contracts and milestone-based agreements often require the client to withhold a percentage until final acceptance. BizBooks Pro tracks that holdback separately so it never gets lost in the billing history.
Every progress invoice is permanently linked to its originating estimate. You can trace the full billing history of any contract from first draw to final payment with a single click.
When you send one invoice at the end of a long engagement, you are essentially financing your client's project out of your own pocket for the entire duration. For a small business, that can mean payroll coming due before any payment has arrived — a cash flow problem that has nothing to do with profitability and everything to do with billing timing.
Progress billing realigns the cash flow so money arrives throughout the project rather than at the end. Clients generally accept it as standard practice for any engagement of meaningful length or scope. And when expectations are set upfront with a clear estimate and defined billing milestones, there are fewer disputes and fewer surprises on both sides.
Construction contractors billing on AIA-style schedules, IT consultants invoicing at project phases, marketing agencies billing monthly retainers against annual agreements — all of them use some form of progress billing. BizBooks Pro's implementation is flexible enough to handle any of these patterns. You define the milestones, set the percentages, and choose whether retainage applies. The software tracks the math and keeps your billing records clean.
Yes. Progress invoices can be created using either a percentage of the estimate total or a specific dollar amount. If you have a milestone defined as "$5,000 upon delivery of Phase 1 deliverables," you can enter that amount directly rather than calculating what percentage it represents.
Yes. Any estimate already saved in BizBooks Pro can be converted to a progress billing contract. Open the estimate and use the "Create Progress Invoice" option to begin drawing down against it. The estimate total becomes the billing ceiling.
Retainage — sometimes called a holdback — is a percentage of each billing draw that the client withholds until final project completion or acceptance. It is most common in construction and engineering contracts. BizBooks Pro tracks the withheld amount as a separate receivable so it appears correctly on your balance sheet and can be invoiced as a final release billing when the project closes out.
BizBooks Pro will warn you if a progress invoice would cause the cumulative billed amount to exceed the original estimate total. You can override the warning if a change order or scope increase justifies it, or you can update the estimate total first and then create the additional billing draw.
Yes. The billing summary panel on any estimate shows every progress invoice that has been created against it, with the date, amount, payment status, and cumulative billing total. You can also generate a contract billing report that shows the full draw history in a printable format suitable for client review or lender documentation.
Start your free 30-day trial and issue your first progress invoice in minutes.