HomeGuides
Guides

Construction guides, in plain English

The billing, job-costing, and compliance mechanics of commercial specialty-trade work — written by operators, with worked dollar examples you can follow line by line. No fluff, no jargon walls.

Billing & payment

AIA pay applications explained
How the G702 and G703 work together: the schedule of values, retainage, stored materials, and how to fill out an application that gets certified.

Schedule of values (SOV) explained
The line-item breakdown behind every progress bill — how it maps to the G703, front-loading risk, and a full worked example.

Retainage explained
How 5–10% withholding works on every pay application, when it comes back, and how to track retainage receivable and payable without losing money you earned.

Stored materials on pay applications
Billing "Materials Presently Stored" on the G703, the backup owners require, and the ASC 606 rule that stored materials earn zero margin until installed.

Cost control & reporting

How to build a WIP schedule
The cost-to-cost method step by step: percent complete, earned revenue, over/under billing, the columns, and the mistakes that break a WIP.

Job costing for commercial roofing
Cost codes, committed vs actual cost, labor burden, and catching overruns before they eat the margin you bid.

Construction cost codes explained
Building a cost-code structure that works: CSI MasterFormat as the starting point, cost code × cost type, and how codes tie the estimate to the field.

Payroll & compliance

WH-347 certified payroll guide
The federal certified payroll form column by column: classifications, fringe, the statement of compliance, and how to file it every week.

Prevailing wage & Davis-Bacon basics
What prevailing wage is, how wage determinations set base rate plus fringe, worker classification risk, and where certified payroll fits in.

Free tools & templates

WIP calculator
Enter four numbers from one job and get percent complete, earned revenue, and over/under billing — free, no signup.

Retainage calculator
Run the G702-style application math: retainage on work and stored materials, earned less retainage, current payment due.

G702/G703 Excel template
A working pay-application workbook: application summary plus continuation sheet with the retainage and stored-materials formulas wired.

WH-347 Excel template
The certified payroll layout in Excel with computed hours, gross, and net — plus the statement of compliance.

Keep exploring

The software that does this math for you

Everything these guides walk through by hand — WIP, pay applications, retainage, certified payroll — SitewideOps computes from your real job data.

Get your free 21-day demo Explore the platform

Anyone interested gets a free 21-day demo account: the full product, every feature, no credit card.