Payments — the pay estimate and the contractor's pay request

Where: Project → Payments (the menu item was "Pay Requests" until 2026-09-29; the address is unchanged).

What this section is for

On the construction-management side the pay estimate comes first. The inspector's record — accepted daily reports, the Quantity Book — says what work was done and when. From that record the construction manager builds a pay estimate for a period: each pay item's prior, this-period and to-date quantities, priced at the contract unit price. The contractor's pay request (their pay application) arrives afterwards and is checked against that estimate, line by line.

The Pay estimate tab

1. Set the period. It defaults to the first of this month through today. Change either date and the estimate rebuilds.
2. Read the lines. For every pay item on the project: unit price, prior quantity (accepted entries dated before the period), this period, to date with the percent of contract quantity, contract quantity, and the money for this period and to date.
3. Watch the notes column.
   • No price — the pay item has no unit price yet, so its amounts are blank. Prices come from the Schedule of Quantities (bid tab) or the engineer's estimate import.
   • Over contract — the to-date quantity exceeds the contract quantity. That is a fact of the record, not an error in the estimate; it usually means a change order is owed.
   • +N pending — that many units sit on daily reports still in draft, submitted or under review. They are not in the estimate. Accept those reports and rebuild.
4. "Only items with work this period" hides items with nothing new; clear it to see the whole schedule.
5. Download CSV gives the same lines and totals as a spreadsheet, named by period.

Nothing on this tab is stored. It is rebuilt from the record every time you open it or change the period, so it is always the record's own answer. Saving a numbered estimate as a document of record is a later step.

Saving an estimate as a record

Save as record writes the estimate you are looking at (with "include pending" if you chose it) as a draft record with its lines frozen as built. Drafts carry no number. Finalize assigns the Record no. — the platform's own number for this project's pay estimates, not the agency's Pay Estimate No. — and records who finalized it and when. A draft or a final can be voided with a reason; the record and its number are kept and marked void. Nothing is ever deleted or edited: to change a saved estimate, void it and save another. Each saved estimate downloads as its own CSV.

The Contractor pay requests tab

1. Upload pay request — the contractor's pay application as .xlsx or .pdf, with the contractor name and the period.
2. The platform reads the lines and compares each one to the record: no matching pay item, quantity over the ledger, no record at all, or a price that differs.
3. Disposition each flagged line — accept, dispute, or mark corrected by the contractor — and mark the request reviewed when done.
4. Tracking sheet (CSV) is the cross-period sheet of every request and its dispositions.

What it reads

• Quantities: accepted Quantity Book entries, by entry date (the estimate) and in total (the comparison).
• Prices: the unit price on each pay item.
• Forecast: pay-item entries on daily reports not yet accepted.
• The uploaded pay requests, their parsed lines, your dispositions and the review events are the stored part of this section.

Common questions

Why is my estimate zero for this month? No accepted Quantity Book entries carry a date in the period. Check the Daily Reports tab for reports still in draft — their quantities show as pending until the report is accepted.

Why does the contractor's total differ from my estimate? Open the request; each line's flag says why — a quantity over the ledger, a price that differs, or an item with no record. The estimate is the record's number; the request is the contractor's claim.