Frequently asked questions

No. PayAppHQ works completely standalone — you can import your schedule of values, run the monthly cycle, generate G702/G703 PDFs, and email pay applications to your GCs without connecting any accounting system.

If you do use QuickBooks Online, the Pro plan adds a sync that pushes each approved pay application into QBO as an invoice, matched against your estimates, with retainage split out correctly — so your books and your billing never drift apart. It’s an add-on, never a requirement.

Yes — both. Pay applications go out from your own company mailbox, so GCs see mail from you, not from a no-reply address. Microsoft 365 users connect Outlook directly; Google Workspace users connect their Gmail account. Each team member who sends billing can connect their own mailbox, so the “From” line is always the actual sender.

Yes, structurally. Every customer gets their own deployment with a dedicated database — not a row in a shared multi-tenant database. Your projects, pricing, pay apps, and payroll data are physically separated from every other customer’s. There is no cross-tenant query that could ever return your data to someone else, because your data doesn’t live in the same database as anyone else’s.

Yes. PayAppHQ is a web app that installs to the home screen as a PWA (progressive web app) on both iPhone and Android — no app store download. PMs open their worksheet, update percent complete on their lines, and submit. The office sees it immediately. There’s nothing to deploy through an MDM and nothing to keep updated.

Easier than you’d expect, because your spreadsheet already contains the two things we need: the schedule of values and what you’ve billed to date. PayAppHQ imports SOVs directly from Excel. For mid-stream projects, we set the billed-to-date baseline so your next application picks up exactly where your last spreadsheet left off — Line 7 (Less Previous Certificates) ties to what your GC has already certified.

On Done-For-You, migration isn’t your problem at all — you send the files and we do the setup.

The module produces reports based on the federal WH-347 format — the form used for Davis-Bacon prevailing-wage work — which most states accept for their own prevailing-wage projects. Some states (for example California with its DIR eCPR system, or New York) have state-specific submission systems or forms; for those we generate the underlying data in exportable form so you can file through the state portal. Ask us about your state during a demo and we’ll give you a straight answer for your situation.

Yes — this is one of the most common reasons subs come to us. Many GCs and CMs require their own pay-app template (their spreadsheet, their PDF, their portal). On the Pro plan and on Done-For-You, we map your billing data onto the GC’s form so the numbers on their paperwork always match your G703 continuation sheet — without anyone re-typing values into a second document. You send us the blank form once; from then on it’s filled automatically each cycle.

Retainage is held per line at your contract rate and carried through every application automatically. When it’s time to release — at substantial completion, at a negotiated rate reduction, or at final billing — PayAppHQ generates the release as its own application with the correct Less Previous Certificates math, so the released amount is never accidentally re-billed and never left behind. This is the part of AIA billing where spreadsheets most often go wrong, and it’s the part we’re most opinionated about.

Flooring and specialty trade subcontractors doing commercial work under GCs — typically firms billing between a handful and a few dozen pay applications a month. It was built inside a working flooring contractor’s billing operation, not as a generic construction tool, so the workflows match how a sub’s office actually runs: PMs report progress, the office produces the package, the GC gets clean paperwork.