On a $480,000 commercial electrical job, your percent-complete on the gear line is "about 60%." The architect's reviewer asks how you know. You don't have an answer your crew's timecards can back up, so the line gets cut to 50%, and roughly $14,400 slides from this month's draw into next month's. Multiply that across four or five lines, every month, on every AIA job, and the float you're financing is real money.
AIA progress billing with the G702 and G703 forms is how commercial and public electrical work gets paid, and for a contractor running QuickBooks the friction is always the same two places: the percent-complete number you can't defend, and the fact that QuickBooks Online won't print a compliant G702/G703 on its own. This guide walks both forms line by line on a real electrical schedule of values, does the retainage and stored-materials math, and shows where your field labor hours become the audit trail that gets the application signed.
What Is AIA Progress Billing, and What Are the G702 and G703?
AIA progress billing is the standard way contractors on commercial and public jobs request partial payment as work is completed, using two paired forms published by the American Institute of Architects: the G702 Application and Certificate for Payment and the G703 Continuation Sheet.
The G702 is the one-page cover sheet. It summarizes the dollars, gets signed by you, and gets certified by the architect or owner's rep before payment is released.
The G703 is the detail behind it. It lists every line of your schedule of values (SOV) and tracks how much of each line is complete this period, to date, and remaining.
Together they answer one question the owner is asking every month: how much of the contract have you actually earned so far, and how much do we owe you now? The G703 builds the answer line by line; the G702 totals it, subtracts retainage and prior payments, and lands on the amount due.
For electrical contractors this matters more than for most trades, because labor is the line item. On a switchgear-and-distribution job, the percent-complete on rough-in and trim is driven almost entirely by crew hours. If you can't tie the number to hours, you're guessing, and a guessed number is the easiest thing for a reviewer to discount.
How Do the G702 and G703 Work Together? A Line-by-Line Walkthrough
The G703 feeds the G702: you fill the continuation sheet first, total it, and carry one number up to the cover sheet. Then the G702 does the contract-level math.
Here's the G702 cover sheet, line by line, the way the 1992 form is laid out (the version most owners still require):
| Line | Field | What it holds |
|---|
| 1 | Original Contract Sum | The contract price before any changes |
| 2 | Net Change by Change Orders | Approved change orders, positive or negative |
| 3 | Contract Sum to Date | Line 1 + Line 2 |
| 4 | Total Completed & Stored to Date | Carried directly from Column G of the G703 |
| 5 | Retainage | The percentage held back on completed work and stored materials |
| 6 | Total Earned Less Retainage | Line 4 − Line 5 |
| 7 | Less Previous Certificates | Everything you've already been paid |
| 8 | Current Payment Due | Line 6 − Line 7 — this is your check |
| 9 | Balance to Finish, Plus Retainage | Line 3 − Line 6 |
The G703 continuation sheet is wider, and it's where the work lives. Each SOV line gets a row, and the columns track it across the life of the job:
| Col | Field | What it holds |
|---|
| A | Item No. | Line number on your SOV |
| B | Description of Work | The scope: rough-in, gear, trim-out, fire alarm |
| C | Scheduled Value | The dollar value assigned to that line |
| D | Work Completed — Previous | From prior applications |
| E | Work Completed — This Period | What your crew finished this month |
| F | Materials Presently Stored | Gear and material on site but not yet installed |
| G | Total Completed & Stored to Date | D + E + F |
| H | % (G ÷ C) | Percent complete for that line |
| I | Balance to Finish | C − G |
| K | Retainage | Amount held on that line |
The relationship to memorize: Column G ÷ Column C gives you Column H, the percent complete. Sum Column G down the whole sheet and that total is Line 4 on the G702. Everything else on the cover sheet is arithmetic from there.
Column E — work completed this period — is the field your crew's hours should be driving. That's the link the rest of this guide is about.
How Do You Build an Electrical Schedule of Values for the G703?
Build your SOV around the way an electrical job actually progresses — phase by phase — so each line's percent-complete maps to a milestone a reviewer can verify, not a lump sum that hides the work.
A single "Electrical — $480,000" line is a billing trap. The architect can't certify a number on it without arguing, and you can't bill stored gear separately. Break it into the phases of your scope:
| Item | Description | Scheduled value |
|---|
| 1 | Service & distribution gear | $140,000 |
| 2 | Feeders & branch rough-in | $130,000 |
| 3 | Branch wiring & devices | $90,000 |
| 4 | Lighting & controls | $60,000 |
| 5 | Fire alarm & low-voltage | $40,000 |
| 6 | Trim-out, testing & closeout | $20,000 |
| Total contract | $480,000 |
This structure does three things at once. It lets you bill stored switchgear under Column F before it's installed, it splits labor-heavy rough-in from material-heavy gear so each percentage is defensible, and it keeps the line count manageable so the reviewer doesn't bounce it for being unreadable.
A word on front-loading. Every sub is tempted to load early phases to improve cash flow, and modest weighting toward gear and rough-in is normal because that's where your early costs actually land. But an SOV that's obviously stacked invites scrutiny on every line afterward. Weight to where the cost is, not past it.
For a deeper build on cost coding the labor side, see our job costing guide for electricians.
How Do You Calculate Percent-Complete and the Payment Due? (Worked Example)
Percent-complete on a line is Column G (total completed and stored) divided by Column C (scheduled value); the payment due is the sum of all those lines, minus retainage, minus what you've already been paid.
Let's run month 3 on the $480,000 job above. Retainage is the standard 10%. Here's the G703 for this application:
| Item | Scheduled value (C) | Prev. (D) | This period (E) | Stored (F) | Total to date (G) | % (H) | Balance (I) |
|---|
| Gear | $140,000 | $70,000 | $28,000 | $28,000 | $126,000 | 90% | $14,000 |
| Rough-in | $130,000 | $52,000 | $32,500 | $0 | $84,500 | 65% | $45,500 |
| Branch & devices | $90,000 | $9,000 | $18,000 | $0 | $27,000 | 30% | $63,000 |
| Lighting & controls | $60,000 | $0 | $6,000 | $0 | $6,000 | 10% | $54,000 |
| Fire alarm | $40,000 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | 0% | $40,000 |
| Trim & closeout | $20,000 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | 0% | $20,000 |
| Totals | $480,000 | $131,000 | $84,500 | $28,000 | $243,500 | 51% | $236,500 |
Now the G702 carries the $243,500 (Column G total) up to Line 4 and finishes the math:
- Line 4, Total completed and stored to date: $243,500
- Line 5, Retainage at 10%: $24,350
- Line 6, Total earned less retainage: $219,150
- Line 7, Less previous certificates (paid through month 2): $152,550
- Line 8, Current payment due: $66,600
Notice the gear line. You billed $28,000 of installed work plus $28,000 of switchgear stored on site, putting that line at 90% while it's physically maybe halfway installed. That's legitimate AIA billing — but only if you can document the stored material, which is the next section.
How Do You Bill Stored Materials (Column F) on an Electrical Job?
Stored materials go in Column F when the gear or material is on site (or in a bonded warehouse) but not yet installed, and almost every owner requires a paid invoice or bill of sale plus proof of insurance before they'll certify a dollar of it.
Electrical is the trade this matters most for. You buy switchgear, transformers, and large conductor early — often with long lead times — and that capital is tied up months before the equipment is energized. Column F is how you recover it without waiting for installation.
The documentation owners typically demand: a paid supplier invoice or bill of sale showing the material is yours, proof it's insured while stored, and frequently a photo with the project visible. On bonded off-site storage they'll want a warehouse receipt too.
One hard rule: stored material on a line can never push that line's total (Column G) past its scheduled value (Column C). You can't bill $145,000 of gear against a $140,000 line. As the gear installs, the dollars move out of Column F and into Column E — the line total doesn't change, just which bucket it sits in.
This is the single most common place electricians leave money on the table, because they wait to bill gear until it's installed. If you bought it and it's on site, it's billable now.
Why Can't QuickBooks Online Produce a Compliant G702/G703 on Its Own?
QuickBooks Online does not natively generate AIA G702/G703 forms and does not track retainage as a separate receivable — its built-in progress invoicing only bills a flat percentage of an estimate, which is not the same thing as a continuation-sheet pay application.
Here's where the gap is, concretely:
| What an AIA pay app needs | What QBO progress invoicing does |
|---|
| G703 with Columns D–K (this-period, stored, to-date, retainage per line) | Bills a single % of an estimate; no per-line continuation-sheet structure |
| Stored materials (Column F) billed separately from installed work | No native concept of stored-but-not-installed material |
| Retainage held back and tracked as a separate receivable over the job | No native retainage hold; you build a workaround item or negative line |
| Architect-certifiable G702 cover sheet on the official form | Produces a standard invoice, not a G702 |
This is why nearly every electrical contractor on QuickBooks runs a hybrid: QuickBooks is the accounting and job-cost system of record, and the pay app gets produced beside it — historically in a spreadsheet, increasingly in a tool that reads the QuickBooks job-cost data and formats the forms.
The retainage piece deserves its own note. The clean QBO setup is a dedicated "Retainage Receivable" account so the held-back 10% lives as an asset you're owed, not as revenue you've already booked. Otherwise your books overstate income all year and you scramble to reconcile at retainage release. Our QuickBooks sync overview covers how the labor and cost data should flow in.
The point isn't that QuickBooks is the wrong system. It's that QuickBooks alone can't answer the architect's percent-complete question — and the answer comes from the field, not the ledger.
How Do Field Labor Hours Make Your Pay App Defensible?
Your percent-complete is only as defensible as the data behind it, and on an electrical job that data is crew hours by cost code: hours logged in the field roll into labor cost-to-date in QuickBooks, which gives you a defensible percent-complete for Column E instead of a guess.
Walk the chain. Your estimate budgeted, say, 1,100 hours for branch rough-in. Your crew has logged 715 of them, coded to that phase. That's 65% of the labor budget consumed — which is exactly the 65% you put on the rough-in line in the worked example above.
Now when the reviewer asks how you got to 65%, the answer isn't "that's about where we are." It's "715 of 1,100 budgeted hours, here's the cost-code report." That number is auditable, and auditable numbers get certified the first time.
This is the link all three of the big AIA guides skip. They treat percent-complete as a figure you simply type in. For an electrical contractor it's the riskiest number on the page, and it should come straight off the timecards.
FieldTimesheet's role here is narrow and specific: it's the field-capture layer that turns crew hours into cost-coded labor data your pay app can stand on. Crews clock to the phase (gear, rough-in, trim), the hours sync to QuickBooks job costing, and the percent-complete on the G703 traces back to real logged time. See how the job-costing feature ties hours to cost codes for the mechanics.
Run the cost of getting this wrong: a 15-person crew that mis-codes or guesses 30 minutes a day is roughly 1,950 lost or unverifiable hours a year — about $146,000 of labor at $75 fully burdened — that you can't cleanly attribute to a billing line. You can estimate your own exposure with our job-costing calculator.
What About Certified Payroll on AIA Jobs?
Most AIA electrical work is commercial or public, and public jobs over $2,000 in federal funding fall under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires a weekly certified payroll report (Form WH-347) filed within seven days of each pay date — built from the same field hours that drive your pay app.
This is the quiet efficiency. The timecards that produce your G703 percent-complete also produce your WH-347: hours by worker, by classification, at the prevailing wage, with the signed Statement of Compliance. One field-capture source, two compliance outputs.
When labor capture lives in one place, certified payroll stops being a separate Friday-night spreadsheet. The same clocked hours that justify Column E also populate the weekly report the contracting agency expects.
For prevailing-wage jobs especially, this is the argument for capturing labor accurately at the source rather than reconstructing it after the fact. The penalties for a bad WH-347 are not theoretical, and the data to get it right is the same data your draw depends on.
What Are the Top Reasons Architects Reject Electrical Pay Apps?
Pay apps get rejected for a short list of predictable reasons, and almost all of them are math or documentation problems you can prevent before you submit — not judgment calls.
| Rejection reason | How to prevent it |
|---|
| Math doesn't tie (Column G ≠ D+E+F, or G702 Line 4 ≠ G703 total) | Let the totals roll automatically; don't re-key between forms |
| Previous-certificates figure is wrong | Carry last month's Line 6 forward exactly — the #1 manual error |
| Over-billing a line past its scheduled value | Cap Column G at Column C; move installed gear from F to E, don't add |
| Percent-complete looks inflated | Back each % with the cost-code hours behind it |
| Stored materials with no paid invoice or insurance | Attach the bill of sale and proof of insurance with the application |
| Change order billed before it's approved | Keep pending COs off the SOV until they're signed (Line 2) |
| Missing lien waiver for the prior payment | Submit the conditional waiver with the app; unconditional follows payment |
Every resubmittal pushes your payment a full cycle — submit on the 25th, miss it, and you're not seeing that money until the next month's run clears. On a $66,600 draw, a single rejection is a month of financing your own labor.
The through-line: most rejections come from numbers that can't be backed up or roll-forward errors a human made by hand. Both disappear when the percent-complete traces to logged hours and the forms total themselves.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between the G702 and G703 forms?
The G702 is the one-page Application and Certificate for Payment — the cover sheet that summarizes the contract sum, retainage, and amount due, and gets certified by the architect. The G703 is the Continuation Sheet behind it, listing every schedule-of-values line and tracking work completed, stored materials, and percent-complete per line. You fill the G703 first and carry its total up to Line 4 of the G702.
Does QuickBooks Online do AIA billing?
Not natively. QuickBooks Online has progress invoicing that bills a flat percentage of an estimate, but it does not produce a compliant G702/G703, does not handle stored materials separately, and does not track retainage as its own receivable. Most electrical contractors keep QuickBooks as the accounting and job-cost system of record and generate the pay app alongside it, feeding it with the labor and cost data QuickBooks holds.
How is retainage calculated on a G702/G703?
Retainage is typically 10% (sometimes 5%) held back from the total completed and stored to date. On the G702 it's Line 5, subtracted from Line 4 to get Line 6. Some contracts reduce retainage to 5% after the job hits 50% complete, or apply retainage only to labor and not stored materials — that's when you use the variable retainage column (K) on the G703 instead of a flat percentage.
How do I bill for materials stored on site but not installed?
Put the value in Column F (Materials Presently Stored) of the G703, and attach a paid supplier invoice or bill of sale plus proof of insurance — most owners require both before certifying it. The stored amount plus installed work can never exceed that line's scheduled value. As the material installs, the dollars shift from Column F (stored) into Column E (work completed this period); the line total doesn't change.
How do field labor hours connect to AIA progress billing?
Crew hours logged by cost code roll into labor cost-to-date in QuickBooks. Comparing hours logged against hours budgeted for a phase gives you a defensible percent-complete for that line on the G703 — for example, 715 of 1,100 budgeted rough-in hours is 65% complete. That ties the number on the form to auditable data, which is what gets the application certified without a markdown.
Do electrical contractors need certified payroll with AIA billing?
On most public and federally funded AIA jobs, yes. Davis-Bacon applies to federal construction contracts over $2,000 and requires a weekly certified payroll report (Form WH-347) filed within seven days of each pay date, paying no less than the prevailing wage plus fringe. The hours that drive your G703 percent-complete are the same hours that populate the WH-347, so one accurate field-capture source serves both.
How often are AIA pay applications submitted?
Monthly, in almost all cases. The contract sets a cutoff date (often the 25th) for work completed through that period, and the application is due shortly after. Missing the cutoff or getting bounced for an error pushes your payment a full cycle — typically 30 days — which is why getting the math and documentation right on the first submission directly protects your cash flow.
Getting the Number Right Before You Submit
AIA progress billing isn't hard arithmetic — it's arithmetic that has to tie out perfectly, every line, every month, with a defensible percent-complete behind each row. The G703 builds it, the G702 totals it, retainage and prior payments finish it.
The two places it breaks for electrical contractors are both solvable: QuickBooks can't print the forms, and the percent-complete is a guess. Pair QuickBooks with a tool that formats the pay app, and feed the percent-complete from cost-coded crew hours, and the application that used to get marked down gets signed the first time. That's the difference between getting paid in 30 days and financing your own labor for 60.
To see how field hours flow into job costing and QuickBooks, start with our time-tracking guide.