AIA G702/G703 Pay Applications, Explained

The AIA G702 (Application and Certificate for Payment) and G703 (Continuation Sheet) are the standard forms most owners and lenders expect for progress billing on a construction contract. G702 is the summary; G703 is the itemized schedule of values behind it. Together, they're how you get paid, and they're also one of the most common places a job's job-cost story and its billing story quietly diverge.

G702: the summary sheet

The top-level numbers: original contract sum, net change by change orders, contract sum to date, total completed and stored to date, retainage, previous certificates for payment, current payment due, and balance to finish. The contractor signs and often has it notarized; the architect/owner's rep certifies the amount they approve, which isn't always identical to what was requested.

G703: where the actual work happens

This is the schedule of values, broken into line items (typically by CSI division or a project-specific breakdown), each showing: scheduled value, work completed this period, materials stored, total completed and stored to date, percentage complete, and retainage.

The most common mistake: a schedule of values that doesn't match how the job is actually being built and costed. If your G703 line items are generic ("General Conditions," "Concrete," "MEP") but your job cost report tracks by CSI code at a finer grain, you end up manually reconciling two views of the same job every billing cycle, and any gap between them is where billing disputes start.

Retainage: track it per line, not as one number

Retainage percentage can vary by line item or by phase of the contract (some contracts reduce retainage after 50% completion), and owners will absolutely check whether your retainage math is internally consistent across periods. A pay application where the retainage doesn't tie out line by line is a fast way to get a payment held up over a clerical issue that has nothing to do with the work.

Stored materials need real documentation

If you're billing for materials stored on-site or off-site but not yet installed, most contracts require documentation: a bill of sale, insurance coverage, sometimes a bonded warehouse. This is a frequent place first-time preparers under-document and get the line item rejected outright.

The real fix: billing off the same numbers as job cost

The pay application shouldn't be a separate spreadsheet someone rebuilds every period from memory. If your schedule of values, your job cost report, and your change order log all pull from the same underlying cost-code structure, generating this period's G702/G703 is a report, not a reconstruction, and the numbers you bill are provably the same numbers you're tracking internally, which is exactly what an owner's rep wants to see when they're deciding whether to trust your next application.

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Groundwork generates AIA-style G702/G703 pay applications directly from the same job cost and change order data. See the job cost module for how the numbers stay connected end to end.