Billing & accounting

What this covers

Two flows of money run through a job in opposite directions: what the client is billed for work completed, and what we are billed by the trades and suppliers doing it. This area covers both, and how each one reaches the books.

Progress billing

Billing follows the work rather than the calendar. The contract is broken into billable line items — Billing Items, what commercial contracting calls a schedule of values — and each billing period a Pay Application is raised against those lines by entering the percent complete on each.

Because a billing is measured line by line, it can be read against the scope it belongs to. The question a pay application answers is not “what is owed this month” but “which parts of this job progressed, and by how much.”

Payments are recorded against the pay application they settle. Each billing therefore carries its own history: what was claimed, what was agreed, what has been received, and what is still outstanding.

Lines carried forward between Billing Items

Each new Billing Item on a contract opens from the one before it, carrying every line forward at the value it closed at, so the contract balance runs unbroken from one billing period to the next.

Saving a Billing Item can lose the lines carried forward from the previous one — either zeroing their value while leaving the line in place, or removing the line altogether — which understates the contract balance. The Billing Item that remains looks internally consistent, so nothing on screen marks the loss. It shows up only when a Billing Item is compared against the pay applications on the same contract, and pay applications are unaffected: they derive their contract figures independently, so billing, payments and the QuickBooks export stay correct throughout.

Fixed in the Admin Portal and in Legacy KI on 17 September 2026. Saving now derives each line’s adjusted value on the server rather than accepting whatever the browser sends, and a line missing from a save is no longer treated as a line you deleted. Deliberately removing a line still works. A Billing Item can be edited in either interface.

Retention is used here: a percentage is withheld from each billing until the work is accepted, carried against the lines it applies to rather than as one number at the foot of the invoice, so what is being held back stays tied to the work it covers.

Subcontractor pay applications are a manual exchange today — the sub sends theirs, and it is keyed in. Bringing that into a portal is a stated goal rather than something that exists.

Vendor invoices

Invoices from trades and suppliers are uploaded in Legacy KI, keyed in by accounting, then assigned to a project or routed to an approver. The approver codes and approves the invoice, and KI runs three checks at that point:

that the cost does not exceed the commitment,
that it does not exceed the budget, and
that the amount entered by the approver ties to the amount accounting entered.

Approved invoices go back to accounting for a final approval and double-check, then push to QuickBooks.

Subcontractor compliance sits alongside those checks as a business rule: a subcontractor providing labour must have a signed Master Agreement and current insurance on file in the Companies module before its invoice is paid. What is on file, and when it expires, is held on the company record — see the company record.

That coding is what makes the cost side real. The actual-cost figures in budgets and cost control are built from coded invoices — documents someone actually received — rather than from an estimate of what has probably been spent by now. It is also what lets a single line on a cost summary be opened up into the specific invoices sitting behind it.

The tie to QuickBooks

QuickBooks is the general ledger. The division of responsibility is exact: KI owns job costs and project billing; QuickBooks owns the books; the integration keeps the two tied together.

That tie has a hard requirement behind it:

Cost per job in KI must equal cost per job in QuickBooks.

Revenue per job in KI must equal revenue per job in QuickBooks.

Where the two disagree, one of them is wrong and neither can be trusted until the difference is explained. There is no automated reconciliation in the system today, so the comparison is done by hand — this is the single biggest pain point in Accounting and the reconciliation the system needs to close.

It matters most before a WIP — a work-in-progress report — is run. WIPs are run by Division and contract grouping because that is how they tie to the P&L, and a WIP built on job costs or billings that disagree with the general ledger will accrue the wrong over/under-billing.

Part 4 §19 — Accounting — all seven sections, including WIP and payroll
Contracts and change orders — where Billing Items come from
Budgets and cost control — what coded invoices feed
Glossary — Billing Items, pay application, retention, WIP