The previous article was about cost getting locked in before revenue. This one is about the other place the numbers quietly drift apart — the monthly bill you send the client, and what accounting has actually paid out.
The bill closes on the 25th. That is the whole runway.
How the bill gets built, and where it goes wrong
The monthly progress bill is assembled from the schedule of values. Each line gets a percentage, and the supporting invoices get attached. In a clean month the percentages match what has been certified and paid, and the bill goes out.
It does not always. Three ordinary reasons cover most of it:
- Human error — a percentage typed against the wrong line, or carried forward from last month without checking
- A bad initial setup — the billing codes were mapped once at the start and have been quietly wrong ever since
- Omission — an invoice landed after the bill was drafted and nobody went back
When you pull the AP side and compare it against the SOV the consultants submitted, you find the SOV showing more than what has actually been paid.
It breaks in two directions, and only one of them is dangerous
Direction one: billed, but the invoice has not been processed. You have claimed progress against work whose cost has not gone through AP yet. On paper you are ahead. In practice you may be overbilling — claiming money for something that has not been certified as done or paid.
Direction two: paid, but not billed. The invoice went through, the cost is on the job, and nobody put it on the bill. This is underbilling. Unpleasant, but it is your own cash flow you are hurting — you will recover it next draw.
Either way the SOV no longer agrees with the ledger. But the first one is the one that ends up in a conversation with the client, so that is the one you hunt for first.
Why it is worth the effort
Two reasons, and they pull in the same direction.
Overbilling is a credibility problem, not an accounting one. If the client’s reviewer finds that you billed 60% against a line where the sub has been paid for 40%, the next bill gets read line by line. Every subsequent draw slows down.
And the cash flow has to be real. The point of getting the bill right is not tidiness — it is that the money coming in should correspond to money going out. A bill inflated by a mapping error is a cash flow forecast you cannot rely on.
The reconciliation, and the calendar
The sequence itself is not complicated. Pull the paid invoices from AP by vendor and job. Match them line by line against the consultant SOV, on both amount and percentage. Isolate the lines that disagree and work out which of the two directions you are looking at. Correct the bill, starting with anything that overbills. Then submit.
The constraint is the calendar. With a 25th cut-off, discovery needs to be done by around the 20th — otherwise you are correcting a bill on the day it has to go out, which is exactly when mistakes get made.
Then you have to tell someone
Here is the part nobody warns you about. You find the discrepancy, you correct it, and now the number you are sending the client is different from what they were expecting.
On a large project, how that lands depends almost entirely on size.
| Size of the difference | What it needs |
|---|---|
| A few thousand | Adjust on the next draw. Usually absorbed without discussion |
| Tens of thousands | Flag it before you submit. A one-line note is enough |
| Six figures | Call before you submit. You explain the cause, not just the number |
On a big job a few thousand dollars is noise and everyone treats it as noise. Two hundred thousand is not noise. At that size the question stops being what the number is and becomes how it got that far without anyone noticing — which is a question about your process, not about the line item.
That is the real argument for reconciling every month rather than at milestones. Small discrepancies caught monthly stay small. The same error left alone compounds across draws until it is the kind of number that requires a phone call.
If you are new to this
- Do the AP-to-SOV comparison every month, not when something looks off
- Work the overbilling direction first — that is the one with an external audience
- Finish discovery by around the 20th so corrections are not being made on the deadline
- When a difference is large, lead with the cause. Sending a corrected number with no explanation invites the worst interpretation
- Keep a note of what caused each one. Repeat causes usually mean the initial billing code setup needs fixing, not the monthly process
If you are preparing for this kind of role rather than already in it, the free Procore certifications and the job-search steps come first. This is unglamorous work and it is most of what protects a project’s cash position. It also happens to be one of the few coordinator tasks where being careful is visible to people well above you.
That closes this short series on CMiC — what it is and why you cannot study it in advance, how cost commits ahead of revenue, and how the monthly bill drifts from the ledger.