Every GC bills on a different calendar: how to run them all at once

The math in billing week is easy. The hard part is that every job has its own deadline and its own submission method, and usually only one person in the office knows all of them.

Then that person takes a week off in July, and the company finds out exactly how much of its cash flow was a memory.

This is an article about the calendar, not the numbers. If the numbers are the problem, start with building a schedule of values that bills clean instead.

A billing cycle has five dates, not one

Most subs track one date per job — “the 25th” — and that is the root of the trouble. A cycle has five, and four of them are the ones that actually bite.

1. The work-through date. The last day of installed work included in this draw. Often the end of the month even when the submission is due on the 25th, which means you are billing five days of work that has not happened yet and estimating it.
2. The cutoff — or pencil — date. When the GC wants a draft, a pencil copy, or a progress number for their own roll-up. Some GCs treat this as informal. Some treat it as the real deadline and the formal submission as a formality.
3. The submission deadline. The hard one. Miss it and you are not late — you are in next month’s cycle.
4. The certification window. How long the GC takes to certify, and whether they certify what you drew. The gap between drawn and certified is the gap you need to see.
5. The expected payment date. Usually counted from certification rather than submission, and often on pay-when-paid or pay-if-paid terms tied to the owner funding the GC. Whether those clauses are enforceable, and how many days a GC may take, varies by state; many states have prompt-payment acts. Check your subcontract and a construction attorney. This is not legal advice.

The distance between date 1 and date 5 can easily run two to three months on commercial work. Everything your office does on dates 2 and 3 is about protecting that time, because you cannot do anything about the rest of it.

Why every GC is different, and what to record for each

GCs do not differ a little. They differ in every dimension that costs you time.

• Cutoff day. The 20th, the 25th, the last business day, the second Friday. No pattern.
• Submission method. A payment portal, an owner-side system, a PDF emailed to a project accountant, or a GC-built form you fill in every month. The method determines who in your office can even do it.
• Required backup. Some want the continuation detail and nothing else. Some want signed tickets for every change line, stored-material invoices, photos, or updated certified payroll.
• Notarization. Still required by some GCs and some public work, which turns a five-minute task into a scheduling problem.
• Waivers with the draw. Many GCs will not process a draw without a conditional waiver submitted alongside it, and some want lower-tier waivers too.
• Who signs on your side. If an officer’s signature is required and that officer travels, the signature is a real dependency.
• How change orders must appear. Whether an approved change order gets its own line or folds into an existing one, and whether they need the CO number referenced.

Write that down once per GC. Seven fields, one row each. That sheet is worth more than any amount of effort spent remembering, because the information does not change often — it just has to survive turnover.

What a missed cutoff actually costs

This is the part that does not feel proportionate until it happens.

Miss a submission deadline by one day and you do not bill one day late. The GC’s cycle has closed. Your work goes into next month’s draw, which means a month of installed work waits an extra full cycle, then waits the certification window, then waits the payment terms. One missed date moves real money by thirty days — and you still paid the crew on Friday.

Worse, it compounds in the one month you can least afford. The months you miss a cutoff are the busy months.

That is why the deadline deserves to be a system rather than a habit. Habits fail under load, and billing week is load.

Back-plan the week, do not run it forwards

The office error is starting at the deadline and working forwards. Start at the deadline and work backwards, and the internal dates fall out on their own.

Counting back from a submission deadline:

• Submission day. Submit, and record that you submitted — date, method, who received it.
• One to two days before. Internal review and signature. Someone who did not build the draw reads it. Every draw needs one set of second eyes, because the errors that cost you are arithmetic and omission, not judgment.
• Three to four days before. Build the draw: percent complete per line, stored materials, approved change orders added, retainage applied, waivers prepared if the GC wants them with the submission.
• Five to seven days before — the field cutoff. This is the date most offices do not have, and the one that fixes the most. Every T&M tag must be signed and in, and every change order must be approved or explicitly deferred, by this day. Anything that arrives after it bills next month.
• Two weeks before. Chase the change orders still sitting in Pending Approval. An approved change order is a billable line. One still in review is not, and the aging on it is your warning.

The field cutoff is the one worth defending. The classic loss is a signed ticket that reaches the office on the 26th for a draw submitted on the 25th — so a month of extra work waits a cycle for no reason other than paper arriving late. A hard internal date, communicated to foremen, recovers that permanently. Getting extras signed before the cutoff is the other half of the same problem.

Running many GCs at once

Three things to hold true across the whole portfolio.

Stagger, do not stack. You cannot change a GC’s cutoff, but you can see the collision coming. If four jobs all submit on the 25th, the only lever you have is the internal schedule: those four get built on the 20th, not the 24th. A calendar shows you that. A list of dates in an email signature does not.

Keep drawn, certified and received as three separate numbers. Billed is not agreed, and agreed is not collected. One “billed to date” column hides both gaps. When a GC certifies less than you drew, you want that visible in the month it happens, while the PM remembers the walk — not at closeout.

Log the submission itself. The date, the method, and who you sent it to. When a GC says they never received a draw, the only useful answer is a record, and “I’m sure we sent it” has never recovered a cycle.

The pencil-copy habit

One practical move that pays for itself: send a pencil copy before the formal cutoff on your larger jobs.

A pencil copy is an unofficial draft of your progress numbers, sent early enough that the GC’s PM can tell you the number is wrong before it is official. If they are going to cut your percentage on line 7, you want to hear it on the 18th, not see it on a certified draw on the 10th of next month. Disagreements found early get resolved inside the cycle. Disagreements found late cost a cycle.

Not every GC will engage. The ones who do are the ones you want more work from.

How SubMark handles it

SubMark is built around the fact that the calendar is the hard part:

• A draw calendar across every job, where each job carries its GC’s cutoff day, due day and submission method, with a reminder before the date — so the schedule is in the system instead of in one person’s head.
• Draws logged against the schedule of values and moving through Draft, Drawn, Certified and Received, so what you billed, what the GC agreed to and what actually arrived stay three readable numbers.
• Retainage held on each draw, with amount drawn minus retainage as the check amount, and totals across every job and GC. When that retainage is released is a separate chase, and a separate article.
• Approved change orders join the schedule of values, so a CO approved before your field cutoff is on the next draw by construction rather than by someone remembering it.
• Change order aging, so the requests still in Pending Approval are visible two weeks out, while there is still time to push.
• Each draw pushes to QuickBooks Online with one click once it is out of Draft, instead of being re-keyed.

An honest limit worth stating: SubMark does not submit to the GC for you. There is no Procore or payment-portal integration — you still submit through whatever system that GC requires, and you log what you submitted. What SubMark removes is the second copy of your own numbers, not the GC’s portal.

Draw tracking covers the calendar and the drawn-certified-received chain in more detail. Office staff are what you pay for; field users and the subs you invite are free and unlimited — see how pricing works. If your GCs require the AIA format, here is how SubMark fits alongside AIA billing.

A checklist you can set up this month

1. One row per GC, with the seven fields above. Build it from last month’s submissions rather than from memory.
2. Five dates per job, derived from that row, on one shared calendar.
3. A field cutoff five to seven days before each submission, told to every foreman, and enforced the first month so it is believed.
4. A second reader on every draw before it goes out.
5. A monthly reconciliation of drawn versus certified versus received, per GC.

None of that is sophisticated. It is just written down, which is the entire difference between billing week taking two days and taking a weekend.