Architecture AEC AIA Billing Project Accounting Studio Operations

AIA Billing Basics for Architecture Firms: G702, G703, and the Workflow That Actually Holds Up

Published May 29, 2026 by Invisible LLC Team · 10 min read

The short version

The American Institute of Architects' G702 (Application and Certification for Payment) and G703 (Continuation Sheet / Schedule of Values) are the two forms that govern progress billing on most institutional, commercial, and many residential projects in the United States. They are not difficult forms. They are exacting ones — and the exacting-ness is where most small architecture studios quietly lose margin, get into receivables disputes, and end up doing Sunday-night spreadsheet math that should have been done in the engagement letter.

TL;DR: AIA billing is a discipline, not a software problem. The G703 schedule of values has to match your contract sum, the G702 application has to roll up cleanly from the G703, retainage has to be tracked separately from billed-but-unpaid, and change orders need to flow into both forms before they get invoiced — not after. Get the workflow right and your principal stops doing invoicing on Sundays. Get it wrong and the slowest-paying line item on your books is the one you just billed.

What G702 and G703 actually are

A short primer for the studio principal who has been signing these forms for years without anyone explaining the structure.

G702 — Application and Certification for Payment. This is the cover sheet. It summarizes the period's work for the project: contract sum to date, total work completed and stored materials, retainage held, prior payments received, current payment due, and signature blocks for the contractor / architect / owner. On a typical AIA-structured project, the architect signs the certification line — confirming that the work claimed has been performed as represented — and the owner pays against that certification. The form itself is one page.

G703 — Continuation Sheet (Schedule of Values). This is the line-item back-up. Every billable element of the contract — phase, allowance, alternate, change order, stored material — is listed on its own row with a budgeted value, work completed this period, work completed previously, total completed, percent complete, retainage withheld, and the balance to finish.

The G703 is the schedule of values; the G702 is the period's summary rolled up from the G703. They are read as a pair. An owner or owner's representative receiving a G702 without a G703 will (correctly) refuse to pay against it.

For architects working under a B101 Owner–Architect Agreement — the most common AIA contract for architectural services — the same form structure applies to your fee, broken out by phase (Schematic Design / Design Development / Construction Documents / Bidding / Construction Administration). Your phase percentages plus reimbursables plus any additional services or change orders constitute your schedule of values. The G702/G703 you submit looks just like a contractor's — the line items are your phases instead of their trades.

The schedule of values is where the money is made — or quietly lost

The single most consequential decision in AIA billing is how the schedule of values is drawn up at the start of the project. Get this right and the entire engagement bills cleanly for a year. Get it wrong and every monthly application is a negotiation.

A few rules that the lexicon-level architecture-firm lecture courses skip:

The schedule of values must equal the contract sum. Including allowances. Including the full owner-approved fee for additional services if those are baked into the contract. Owner's reps will check this with a calculator on the first application.
Phase weighting should reflect actual labor effort, not industry-standard percentages. The AIA's old "15/15/40/5/25" SD/DD/CD/Bid/CA split is a starting heuristic — it's not gospel and it's rarely accurate for the way modern small studios actually staff projects. A studio that runs heavy CDs because they self-perform construction administration consulting work will under-bill itself if it uses the textbook split. Weight the phases against the hours plan you built when you priced the project.
Reimbursables ride on their own line, billed at cost-plus-markup if the contract allows. Don't bury reimbursables in a phase. They have their own accounting treatment, their own approval cycle with the owner, and their own backup-documentation requirement. Bury them and you'll lose the markup the contract entitled you to.
Don't bake in cushion you can't justify. Some firms front-load early phases to improve cash flow ("we'll bill SD at 20% instead of 15%"). On a sophisticated owner, this gets flagged and reduces trust for the rest of the engagement. The cleaner path is a mobilization line, sized honestly, included in the schedule of values from day one.

A small architecture studio billing on a B101 should expect the owner's project manager to approve the schedule of values before the first G702 goes out. If your contract doesn't already require that, add it to your engagement letter. It saves a month of receivables friction down the line.

Retainage: the part most studios get wrong

Retainage is a percentage of each billing held back by the owner until the project (or a defined phase / substantial completion milestone) is complete. Typical retainage is 5–10% — 10% is more common on public-works and institutional projects, 5% on commercial, sometimes zero on smaller private work.

Three things to nail down:

1. Retainage is held against the work completed this period — not against the application total. The G703 has a dedicated retainage column. Each line item shows the dollar amount retained, computed from work completed this period (and sometimes from total work completed, depending on contract language). The G702 then summarizes that into the period's retainage total and the cumulative retainage held to date.

2. Retainage is income earned, but cash not yet received. This is the part where the books quietly drift if your accounting setup isn't right. The amount you invoiced is your AR. The amount the owner paid is cash. The retainage they held back is still on your AR — it's not lost income, it's deferred payment. If your bookkeeper is netting retainage out of revenue when it's withheld, your top line is wrong and your AR aging is wrong.

The correct accounting treatment in QuickBooks (or similar) is to set up a Retainage Receivable sub-account under Accounts Receivable. Each G702 application records the full billed amount as AR, the cash deposit clears the non-retainage portion, and the retained amount sits in Retainage Receivable until the project releases it. When retainage is released at substantial completion or per the contract milestone, it moves from Retainage Receivable to cash.

3. Retainage release is its own G702. Most owners require a separate Application for Payment for retainage release, often with a final lien-waiver and substantial-completion-certificate package. Build the retainage-release submission into your project closeout checklist; it is the last reliable cash event of the engagement and the one most studios let slip for 30–90 days because the project is "done."

Change orders flow through the schedule of values, not around it

A change order on an AIA project is a contractual modification — it adjusts the contract sum, the contract time, or both. From a billing standpoint, the right workflow is:

Document the change in writing before any additional work begins. Use AIA's G701 (Change Order) or your firm's equivalent.
Get the owner's signature on the change order before the next G702 cycle. Unsigned change-order work is at-risk work — billable on faith, not on contract.
Add the change order as a new line on the G703. It gets its own row, its own budgeted value, and its own progress tracking. Don't fold it into an existing phase line — that obscures the modification and makes substantiation harder later.
The G702 rolls up the new total. Your contract sum to date now includes the change order. The owner's representative checks that the schedule of values still ties to the contract sum, including all approved modifications.

The failure mode here is real and common: the change-order work gets performed (and incurred as labor cost) two or three weeks before the change-order paperwork is fully executed, and the studio bills it in the next G702 against a schedule of values that doesn't yet reflect the change. The owner's PM kicks the application back. Now you have unbilled WIP, a delayed receivable, and a Sunday-night conversation about a paperwork gap you could have closed during business hours.

The workflow that actually holds up at a six-person studio

For studios with one or two principals plus a small project-architect team — the typical Invisible client profile — here is the AIA billing workflow that actually keeps margin clean without requiring enterprise software:

Once per project, at engagement start:

Draft the schedule of values in spreadsheet form before the first G703 goes out. Confirm it ties to the contract sum and the B101 (or whichever AIA contract governs).
Get the owner's PM to approve the schedule of values in writing. Email is fine.
Set up the project in QuickBooks (or your job-cost system) with a class or project code that maps 1:1 to the AIA project. Each phase becomes a sub-class or sub-project so phase margin is trackable on close.
Set up the Retainage Receivable accounting if the contract has retainage. Most B101 engagements on private commercial work don't, but most institutional and public-works engagements do.

Once per month, on a fixed billing date:

Update the G703 with this period's percent complete by line item. The conversation that drives the percent-complete number happens between the principal and the project architect, not between the principal and the bookkeeper — the bookkeeper records what's reported, but the studio leadership owns the call.
Roll the G703 up into the G702. Most modern AIA-billing tools (Newforma, BQE Core, Deltek Ajera, even Procore for larger firms) generate both from a single project file. For the smaller end of the studio market, AIA-licensed Excel templates plus careful QuickBooks setup do the job.
Submit G702 + G703 to the owner's project manager with whatever supporting backup the contract requires (timesheets in some cases, lien waivers in others, reimbursable receipts when applicable).
Record the invoice in QuickBooks as the gross billed amount (not net of retainage). Move the retained portion into Retainage Receivable.
Update the WIP report — billed-to-date, earned-to-date, over/under billing position. WIP discipline is where firm-level project margin visibility lives; without it, the schedule of values is a billing tool but not a profitability tool.

Once per project, at close:

Submit the retainage-release G702 the same week substantial completion is achieved.
Final reconciliation between billed-to-date, earned-to-date, and project profitability. This is the conversation that tells the principal which projects actually made money and which quietly broke even — see the next section.

Why this matters beyond the form itself

The G702/G703 workflow is the surface. Underneath it is the same operating question every studio principal eventually asks: "Did this project actually make money?"

You can only answer that question if three things are true:

Your time is being tracked against the project, not against the firm at large. Even informally — a timesheet, a Toggl entry, a column in a spreadsheet. Project hours are the cost side of project margin.
Your G703 schedule of values matches the way you actually staffed the project. A schedule of values with the right total but the wrong phase weighting will produce phase-level billing that's disconnected from phase-level cost, and the project margin question goes back to a gut feel.
Reimbursables are tracked separately on both sides — billed reimbursables on the AR side, reimbursable costs on the COGS / direct-project-expense side. Buried reimbursables produce phantom margin in one phase and phantom loss in another.

Get those three right and your WIP report tells you, at any point in the project, how much you've billed, how much you've actually earned (percent complete × contract value), and where you are over- or under-billing. That report is what a fractional CFO or controller would look at quarterly to spot drifting margin. For studios without that role, it's also the document a serious bookkeeper should be producing as part of the monthly close — not something you build yourself the night before the principal's meeting.

A note on tools and software

A few common questions from architecture studios evaluating their AIA billing stack:

Does QuickBooks Online support AIA billing natively? No. QuickBooks Online tracks AR, projects, and class-based reporting well enough for the underlying accounting, but it does not generate AIA-compliant G702/G703 forms. Most small studios use QuickBooks Online for the books and either (a) a separate AIA-billing template in Excel that ties back to QuickBooks, or (b) a project-billing tool like BQE Core, Deltek Ajera, or Newforma for the AIA forms with a sync into QuickBooks for the accounting.
Is Procore worth it for a small studio? Procore is built for general contractors. It's overkill for a typical architecture studio under 25 staff. The exception: if you're doing construction-administration-heavy work where you're on the GC's Procore environment anyway, the access can be useful for tracking owner-approved change orders that affect your fee.
What about Monograph, BQE Core, Deltek Ajera, Newforma? All four are credible studio-billing tools. Monograph is the most modern and the easiest to set up; Ajera and Newforma are richer for larger firms; BQE Core sits between. None of them is a substitute for getting the schedule of values right at the front of the engagement.
What about Bill.com or Ramp on the AP side? Useful for managing the vendor and subcontractor AP side of an architecture engagement — payments to engineers, renderers, consultants, contract drafters. They are not AIA billing tools; they are AP tools.

The honest answer: the software question matters less than the workflow discipline. We have seen six-person studios run clean AIA billing on QuickBooks Online plus a well-built Excel template. We have also seen $5M-revenue studios on Deltek struggle with the same problems because the schedule of values wasn't right at engagement start.

AIA billing is the single most studio-specific piece of accounting most architecture firms touch. It is also the one piece of monthly work where a competent industry-fluent bookkeeper produces the most visible time savings for the principal — the Sunday-night invoicing window stops existing. We support architecture and design studios like SMNG A, Brush Architects, The Betterment Society, and advene with phase-billing workflows, schedule-of-values setup, retainage tracking, and the project-margin reporting that lives downstream of all of it. If you're running G702/G703 yourself on Sunday afternoons — or worse, not running them at all because the workflow is too painful — Invisible's bookkeeping and AR services for architecture firms are built around exactly this. Let's get your next billing cycle off your plate before the principal does it from a kitchen table again.