Billing your GCs through Procore? Test subcontractor invoices on periods already approved.

When the GC opens a billing period, someone on your side opens the commitment, enters this period's work and any new stored material on each line, asks for retainage due back, attaches the waivers and backup the GC wants, and sends it before the due date. If a number or a page is off, it comes back marked Revise & Resubmit and the period's clock keeps running.

For the test, AI works from copies of closed periods: your PM's progress figures, stored-material invoices, executed change orders and each invoice as you sent it. It drafts every line the way Procore's invoice form asks for it and writes down what the period should have carried. Nothing is entered in Procore or sent to a GC. Your reviewer lays each draft beside the version the GC approved.

Nothing bills until the period exists. The GC's invoice administrator has to create a billing period, with its billing date, period start, period end and due date, before any subcontractor invoice can be made. An Invite to Bill can only go out when the commitment has an invoice contact, your Subcontractor SOV is approved where one exists, and the due date hasn't passed. On the GC's side, the Invoicing tool's Subcontractor tab shows each commitment as Not Invited, Invited, Accepted or Declined, or flags No Invoice Contacts or SSOVs Not Approved. The invite is only a courtesy, though: an invoice contact can open the commitment and bill without one. The draft records each period's dates, so a missing invite never turns into a missed billing.

The Subcontractor SOV shapes every invoice. The SSOV splits each commitment line, by budget code, into detail lines. Procore keeps its Submit button dimmed until Remaining to Allocate reads zero on every line, marks the SSOV Under Review once you submit, and carries only those detail lines over to the invoice. An amount-based commitment asks for Work Completed This Period; a unit-based one asks for cumulative Total Progress and the new quantity. New Materials Stored shows up only if the GC turned on Enable Billing Separately for Stored Materials, and with the stored-materials setting on, last period's Materials Presently Stored moves into Work Completed from Previous Application on the next invoice. The draft follows whichever form your commitment uses.

Retainage is set by the commitment, not the invoice. You can't change the rate on the invoice. What you enter is the retainage you want released, and Procore keeps work retainage and materials retainage in separate columns. The draft carries the commitment's rate, shows what has been held on each line so far, and asks for a release only where your subcontract allows one at that point in the job.

Waivers travel with the invoice. Where the GC pays through Procore Pay, waivers are part of the invoice, powered by Levelset, a Procore company. Only an invoice contact can sign one, and only while it shows Pending Signature. A signed unconditional waiver stays locked until the payment reaches your bank account, the GC cannot give itself permission to release it, and if you're paid outside Procore Pay someone eligible at your company releases it by hand. Your sub-tiers sign outside Procore, and you upload their waivers with your invoice for the open period. Outside Procore Pay, a GC may ask for a waiver or a signed PDF of the invoice in the invoice's Attachments instead. The draft lists which waivers each period needed, from whom, and which were missing.

After approval, the GC's accounting has a say. Only Approved and Approved as Noted invoices show in the GC's budget, in its Job to Date Costs column, and Pending Owner Approval means the invoice has gone up to the owner or funding source. A GC that exports to its ERP then has an accounting approver, someone holding the Can Push to Accounting privilege, accept each approved invoice for export or reject it with a reason, which puts it back in an editable state in the Commitments tool and emails whoever created it. Your reviewer watches for what draws those returns: a line billed past its scheduled value, stored material counted twice, retainage asked for early, a waiver missing from the period.

With your reviewer's yes, each new billing period gets the same drafts for about 30 days.

Every draft waits for a person on your team to approve it, and your team still enters each invoice in Procore and signs every waiver. The scoring sheet from the test stays in use, so your reviewer can see, period by period, whether a draft would have been sent back.