One contract, fourteen buildings: which axis your schedule of values should follow

Four of our trade pages describe the same problem in four trades’ words, and none of them is about a schedule of values on its face.

Wood framing: Your contract is one job. Your job is fourteen buildings. Acoustical ceilings: Grid, tile and specialty ceilings billed area by area. Paving: Each course and each phase billable on its own line. Excavation: Unit-price and quantity lines billed against surveyed work.

They are all one argument. Your contract value arrived as a single number. The work arrives in pieces, released on somebody else’s clock, and every month you have to convert the pieces into a percentage somebody else signs. The structure you use to do that conversion is the schedule of values, and you build it in about twenty minutes in the week the contract comes back signed.

If you have not built one yet, start with how to structure an SOV that bills clean. That article makes the case for enough lines. This one is about something narrower and harder to undo: which axis the lines follow — building, floor, phase, or area — and what each choice costs you at draw time.

The four axes, and what each one actually proves

Every SOV line is a claim about a slice of the contract. The axis is what defines the slice.

By scope element. Material, framing, hang, finish, punch. This is what almost every trade’s breakdown looks like, and it is the axis a GC’s accounting department expects, because it maps to how your trade is priced.

By building. Building 1 through Building 14, each carrying its share of the contract.

By floor or level. Level 2 of the podium, floors 4 through 8 of the tower.

By area. The corridors, the amenity package, the garage, the east elevation, the clubhouse.

Those four are not alternatives in practice. On a phased job the shape that works is usually two of them crossed — a scope element inside a location — and the real decision is which location axis you cross it with.

Here is the part that costs money. A line can only prove what its axis describes.

• A pure scope-element SOV proves how far along the trade is. It cannot prove where. “Walls — 35%” on a fourteen-building site is one number standing in for four buildings topped out, three framed to the deck, and seven that are staked outlines. Our framing page puts the consequence plainly: Percent complete on a line like that is arithmetic somebody does in their head, and the person who checks it is the person who decides what to pay you.
• A pure building SOV proves where. It cannot prove how far. You finish framing Building 3 and the line is only partly earned, because the line also carries the sheathing and the blocking you have not done yet — and now you are back to arguing a percentage, just a smaller one.
• Crossed, the line proves both. Building 3 / Walls is a thing a superintendent can walk to and either agree with or not. Most arguments end at a thing you can walk to.

The cost of crossing them: the line count multiplies

This is why people do not do it, and the arithmetic is worth seeing before you decide rather than after.

Line count is buildings × floors × scope elements. A fourteen-building garden job with three floors each and five scope elements is 210 lines. That is not a schedule of values, it is a database. Few GC project managers will want to review 210 lines every month, and you are not going to want to report progress against them either.

So the skill is choosing the coarsest axis that still matches the release. Three ways down from 210, in the order they are usually right:

1. Collapse the floors. Fourteen buildings × five elements is 70 lines. Fine, if the GC releases and accepts a whole building at a time, which on garden-style work is often how it goes.
2. Group the buildings. If the site is twelve near-identical residential buildings plus a clubhouse plus the garages, that is three groups, not fourteen. Fifteen lines. The identical buildings only need separating if they get released, inspected or paid separately — and sometimes they do, which is exactly the question to ask.
3. Collapse the elements. Keep the locations and go to three elements instead of five. Do this one last, because collapsing elements is what sends you back to arguing percentages.

The question that decides it: who releases the work?

Set your own preference aside for a minute. The axis should match the unit the GC hands you, because that is the unit they will inspect, accept and pay against.

Ask four things before you cut a single line.

What does the GC release? If the superintendent’s sequence is “Building 4 is yours Monday,” bill buildings. If it is “floors 6 through 9 are turned over,” bill floors. If it is “the corridors are clear, the units are not,” bill areas — which is the acoustical ceilings situation exactly, because our ceilings page leads with Grid, tile and specialty ceilings billed area by area for a trade whose release is an area another trade finally vacated.

Who verifies it, and how? The verification method is the real axis test. If the only way to check a line is a walk, name the line after something walkable. If the check is a survey or a count — earthwork, haul-off, striping, tonnage — then the axis is the quantity, and you are in unit price territory rather than percent complete.

What gets invoiced to you separately? If your lumber package is released building by building and sits in a lay-down yard for weeks, your stored material has a location, and a stored-materials line that matches that location bills cleanly while one site-wide material line does not.

What does the GC’s own SOV look like? Ask them. If they are billing the owner building by building, an SOV that matches theirs is usually easier to approve than one somebody has to translate every month.

One more thing, hedged because it belongs to your paperwork rather than to us: some subcontracts and billing instructions specify a breakdown, or require the GC’s approval of yours, and many say something about the format. Your contract governs. Read it before the twenty minutes, not after. Nothing here is legal advice.

You get roughly one clean shot at this

The reason to take the decision seriously is that an SOV gets harder to restructure the moment you bill against it. That is true in a filing cabinet, and it is true in SubMark on purpose.

A project in SubMark has exactly one schedule of values. Until it locks, you can add, edit and delete lines one at a time. What you cannot do is replace the whole structure: the wizard builds the SOV once, on a job that has none, and there is no button to run it again over an SOV that exists. After that, the structure changes line by line or not at all.

The lock itself is narrow, and worth knowing exactly. The SOV locks when a pay application built in SubMark is submitted. A draw you logged from the GC’s own PDF does not lock it. Once locked, the original contract lines can no longer be edited or deleted, and anything new goes on through Add CO Line.

So the structure is cheap in week one, awkward in month two, and effectively permanent by month three. Spend the twenty minutes.

How SubMark cuts it

The SOV builder is a four-step wizard, and the steps are the decision in order: Contract & Schedule Items, Buildings & Floors, Square Footage, Review & Submit.

Step one is your scope elements. A named list, each with a percent of contract value. The percentages have to total 100 before the wizard will let you move on, which is a small thing that catches a real error. There is a Save as Defaults button, so the list you argue about once becomes the list every future job starts from.

You do not start from blank. All 29 trade setup packs ship a seeded breakdown, in the trade’s own vocabulary rather than a generic five:

trade pack	the breakdown it opens with
Wood Framing	Material 40%, Floor 15%, Walls 25%, Roof 15%, Punch 5%
Paving & Asphalt	Sub-Base 20%, Base 20%, Paving 45%, Striping 10%, Punch 5%
Acoustical Ceilings	Material 45%, Grid 30%, Tile 20%, Punch 5%
Excavation & Sitework	Mobilization 10%, Earthwork 35%, Utilities 30%, Grading 20%, Punch 5%
Concrete	Forming 25%, Reinforcement 15%, Concrete Material 35%, Place / Finish 20%, Cure / Strip 5%

Our excavation page is blunt about what that fourth row leaves out: Your schedule of values has no material line to hide in. These are starting points. Edit them to your contract and save them.

Step two is the location axis. You add buildings, name them, and set a floor count for each, one to ninety-nine. Add Custom Building gives you one with its own name instead of a number, for the parts of a site that are not Building N — the field’s placeholder is e.g. Clubhouse, Garages, which is what the button is for. The step keeps three figures in front of you while you work: Buildings, Total Floors, and Line Items (est.). You see the 210 before you commit to it.

Step three is square footage per floor. That is what weights the split.

Step four generates the lines. Each line’s value is the contract value × the element’s percent × that floor’s share of total square footage. Descriptions come out as Building 3-Floor 2-Walls, and as Clubhouse-Walls for a building with a single floor, so the axis is legible in the line itself.

Two details that matter more than they sound. Every generated value is rounded to the nearest $100 — nobody wants to submit a line reading $18,437.62 — and then the leftover is redistributed in $100 steps to the lines that rounded furthest, so the SOV still sums to your contract value exactly. And every line gets a code, auto-numbered 001, 002, 003, which you can overwrite before the SOV locks; the code field on the Add Line form suggests e.g. 1A, because a line code on a multi-building job is usually a building letter and a sequence rather than a serial number.

Those are line numbers on your SOV, not cost codes. SubMark has no cost code library, no import and no mapping — labor goes to the job, and to a phase only if phase tracking is switched on. The finished SOV exports to Excel or PDF in SubMark’s layout; if the GC requires their own template or portal, the lines still have to be entered there, and their requirements govern.

The second axis: your trade’s own word for a piece of work

The SOV is how you bill the pieces. There is a separate structure for how you run them, and it is worth knowing it exists, because people try to make the SOV do both jobs and it does neither well.

Phase tracking in SubMark is per project, and each trade pack renames the unit to that trade’s word for it. Wood framing calls it a Building. Concrete calls it a Placement. Structural steel calls it a Sequence. Excavation calls it a Phase. Fire sprinkler calls it a Zone. Glazing and EIFS call it an Elevation. Doors, frames and hardware call it an Opening. Low voltage calls it a Drop, fire alarm a Device, countertops a Top, roofing and masonry a Section, trim and millwork a Room. Most of the rest call it an Area.

Our framing page states the setup in one sentence: Wood Framing is the one SubMark trade pack whose unit of work is a whole structure: pick it at setup, switch Building Tracking on in Settings, and the app calls that unit a Building, not an area.

Two honest limits on that. It is a module you switch on in Settings, and it is on by default only in the drywall pack. And phases are a field and cost structure rather than a billing one: crew hours can be tagged to a phase once it is on, but nothing flows from a phase onto an SOV line. If you want the two axes to agree, align them deliberately when you name them.

At draw time, the structure does the work

Billing against a well-cut SOV is a count rather than a negotiation, and the mechanics follow the axis you chose.

For each line you enter the dollars completed this period. Percent billed per line and for the job overall (completed plus stored, over the line’s value) is computed from that, not typed — which removes the most common source of month-end argument, the percentage somebody estimated and nobody can reproduce. Stored materials sit in their own column on each line. Retainage is recorded as withheld per draw and totaled; it is not a per-line figure.

Once a job has an SOV, approved change orders arrive on it as their own lines, carrying the change order they came from, which is why you should never fold extra work into a base line. A base line that quietly grew is a line you cannot defend in a walk. See the change order process for how one gets there, and the billing calendar for when it has to be there by.

If you are not building draws in SubMark at all — plenty of subs submit through the GC’s portal and always will — a logged draw records the job’s totals instead: contract sum including change orders, completed and stored to date, retainage held, balance to finish. Those figures can be read from an uploaded PDF and confirmed by a person, or typed. That is a record of a draw rather than a rebuild of it, and it does not touch your lines.

The short version

• The axis is the decision, not the line count. Match it to the unit the GC releases, inspects and accepts.
• Cross a scope element with a location axis, then collapse the coarsest axis that still matches the release — floors first, buildings second, elements last.
• Look at the estimated line count before you commit. 210 lines is a database, not a schedule of values.
• Do it before the first draw. Restructuring is cheap in week one and effectively impossible in month three.
• Keep change orders on their own lines, always.

The twenty minutes you spend on the axis is the only twenty minutes on the job that pays you back every month for a year.

See how the draw side works, or what it costs.