Construction AP operations
The operating library for contractor payables.
Construction AP is its own discipline: every invoice is a job-cost entry, approval means field verification, and payments carry waiver and retention obligations. This is where we publish how the whole function should run — guides, controls, benchmarks, and calculators, maintained as the product evolves.
Six pillars
Everything hangs off six operating questions.
How invoices flow, how they get coded, how subs get paid safely, how QuickBooks fits, how the controls hold, and how you know it is working. Each pillar links the deep guide, the product workflow, and the tool that puts numbers on it.
Pillar 01 · Operations
Construction AP operations
The complete lifecycle — intake, coding, matching, field approval, compliance gates, and posting — plus the roles and exception taxonomy that keep it running.
Read the complete guidePillar 02 · Job costing
Job and cost-code accuracy
Budget, commitments, actuals, and projections across job, phase, cost code, and cost type — and what miscoding does to project margins.
See job-cost trackingPillar 03 · Subcontractors
Waivers, retention, and sub payments
Conditional vs unconditional waivers, payment blocks that actually block, retention withheld at contract terms, and gated releases with final documentation.
See waiver controlsPillar 04 · QuickBooks
QuickBooks construction AP
What QuickBooks covers, what it does not, and how a construction AP layer syncs vendors, jobs, classes, and coded bills back to the file your accountant trusts.
See the QuickBooks workflowPillar 05 · Controls
Controls and risk
Segregation of duties, vendor bank-change verification, commitment tolerances, approval authority, audit trails, and what should never post automatically.
Read the controls frameworkPillar 06 · Benchmarks
Benchmarks and economics
The ten metrics a construction AP function should track, the formulas behind them, and the best available baselines — labelled honestly as what they are.
Open the benchmark centrePut numbers on it
Calculators and assessments
Every tool produces an immediate result, a comparison against the published baselines, and the next steps — so the business case is built from your numbers, not ours.
Invoice Approval Delay Calculator
Quantify what field approvals cost in days, chasing hours, and missed discounts.
Retainage Calculator
Retention held, projected, and still to accrue — including reduction milestones.
Job-Cost Error Impact Calculator
What coding errors do to project margins, rework hours, and overrun risk.
Lien-Waiver Risk Assessment
Score your waiver controls in five questions and find the weakest one.
QuickBooks AP Maturity Assessment
Place your QuickBooks-based AP workflow on the four-stage maturity curve.
Cost Per Invoice Calculator
Your true fully loaded processing cost, compared against published baselines.
Research
Construction AP Benchmark Centre
The metric set for contractor payables — cost per invoice, approval cycle by role, first-pass coding accuracy, missing-waiver rate, retention outstanding — with formulas, targets, and sourced baselines. Methodology stated on the page; construction medians publish as the sample becomes defensible.
Open the benchmark centreTemplates
The construction AP toolkit
The working documents behind the guides: AP SOP outline, approval authority matrix, vendor bank-change verification checklist, waiver tracking columns, and the retention register — in one toolkit you can put to work this month.
Get the toolkitLow-friction next step
Send the construction AP toolkit
The SOP outline, approval authority matrix, bank-change checklist, waiver tracker, and retention register from our construction AP guides.
The product behind the library
Nexus Build runs this whole workflow on QuickBooks.
Invoice capture with job-cost coding, commitment matching, field approvals with reminders, waiver collection with e-signature, and retention tracked to release — written back to QuickBooks as clean, coded bills.