HeavyJob’s Pay Estimate feature allows you to manage your billing, and track payments efficiently. At the heart of the Pay Estimate Summary, where Pay Estimates are created and refined, is a grid listing the job’s Pay Items. Each Pay Items’ quantity is gathered from other sections of HeavyJob (including change tracking items, claims, and adjustments), and it provides a starting point for what quantity of completion you should invoice. Once the Pay Period is finalized, and quantities are confirmed with the owner, the Pay Estimate Summary Report can be used as the actual invoice document.

If you want to be successful with Pay Estimates in HeavyJob, there are at least two core behaviors that you should be implementing:

• Entering production quantities with every time card to drive pay items,
• and Verifying that those reported quantities are correct with a thorough review and approval process that will ensure daily accuracy on the job.

The idea is that if your field users are reporting quantities, and project managers and/or superintendents are verifying the work performed on a daily basis, then you should be able to trust your progress and the amount you can invoice. However, what happens when you submit your invoice, and you know that your quantity is correct, but the inspector says you can only claim a portion of what you had completed for this period? You have every right to get paid for the work you performed, and protect your business.

At this point you have two solutions inside HeavyJob:

• If you evaluate your production, and deem a mistake was made, you can choose to adjust your quantities on the time card using the Production Quantity Adjustment tool.
• However, let’s say you are following your thorough review process, and you trust your quantities reported are true. In this case, you would not want to change the history because the field did not report anything incorrect. You do want to get paid what you are owed, however. In this case, you can use the pay estimate to mark quantities as disallowed until you can get paid what you deserve. When the next period starts, the program will prompt you to address the disallowed quantities.

If you are a HeavyJob user that is not using Pay Estimate, how are you currently comparing your Inspector’s quantity with your HeavyJob quantity, and getting your actual quantity to your accounts payable? Are you exporting all of your quantities and tracking it using a 3rd party application? Are you adding an extra layer of complexity to your tracking? If you would like to learn more, and begin using Pay estimates, I have provided some resources below to get you started.

Here is one example of troubleshooting that our support can help with:

Let’s say that you have verified your production quantities for cost codes and materials, but your invoice quantities are still incorrect. For this particular Pay Item, multiple cost codes should be driving your invoice quantity. In this case, you may need to check how the cost code or advanced budget balance was set up to drive the pay item’s quantities. Our support has created an article on how to adjust those factors so that the proper weight can be applied. You can use the support library to ask questions or call our 24/7 support for assistance.

Here are some resources that we have created for you on Pay Estimates:

• Click here for a Webinar on Managing Billing with HeavyJob Pay Estimate
• Click here for a Webinar on Understanding Pay Cycles, and how to manage Disallowed Quantities (beginning at the 13 minute mark)
• Click here for a catalog of all Pay Estimate documentation from our Support Help.
• Click here to access our collection of all past Webinars.