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Story Renovations

Billing & accounting

What this covers

Section titled “What this covers”

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

Progress billing

Section titled “Progress billing”

Billing follows the work rather than the calendar. The contract is broken into billable line items — the schedule of values — and each billing period a pay application is raised against those lines for the work completed to date.

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.”

Retention — a percentage withheld from each billing until the work is accepted — is 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.

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.

Vendor invoices

Section titled “Vendor invoices”

Invoices from trades and suppliers are entered against the project and coded by cost code, with the invoice document attached to the 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 accounting books

Section titled “The accounting books”

QuickBooks Online is the accounting system of record. Billings, payments, and vendor invoices synchronize to it, so the numbers on a project and the numbers in the books originate from the same transactions rather than being kept in step by hand.

This matters for the same reason cost coding does. A project record that disagrees with the accounting system is a project record nobody can act on, and keeping one authoritative set of books removes the question of which version is correct.

What you see as a client

Section titled “What you see as a client”

You receive a pay application for each billing period, itemized against the schedule of values, so you can see which parts of the work you’re being billed for and how far along each one is — not a lump sum with a date on it.

Payments are recorded against the billing they settle, and your contract, your change orders, and the schedule of values all sit alongside it.

Section titled “Related”