Module 08

Financials

The contract sum chain, change events, pay applications, and the allocations — contingency and allowances — the architect's record of someone else's numbers.

8.1 · The role boundary

What Financials is — and isn’t

Financials is the architect’s record of — and review surface for — someone else’s numbers. You certify a pay application (you never build the schedule of values). You review and recommend a change (the Owner decides). You record the executed change order. You track the GMP (the CM quantifies it).

Deliberately absent

Fee tracking, invoices, and receivables — that’s practice management, not project management. And G703 line-item entry: the signed G702/G703 PDF is the record. Project budget is just two optional Settings fields the dashboard reads.

8.2 · Overview

The contract sum chain

  $4,820,000  original award · GMP · awarded May 12
+   $64,300  executed change orders
= $4,884,300  current

Two numbers are never collapsed into one: divergence (current vs original) and contingency used (drawn vs allocated) — money that moved the sum vs money that moved inside it.

A per-award selector plus an all-awards rollup; GMP amendments and contract groups appear when they exist.

8.3 · Changes

Change events

Change events come in three kinds — PCO (potential change order), CUR (contingency use request), AUR (allowance use request) — each with the contractor’s number, the amount, a linked origin (an RFI, PR, CCD, or observation), any time impact, and an internal note that never appears on the record copy.

Status	What it means
In review	The event is on your desk.
Revision required	You asked for a reprice; the ball is with the contractor. Filing the revised document puts it back in review.
Approval recommended	The architect’s advisory signature.
Owner approved	A separate state, because it’s a separate person.
Not approved	Priced and declined, with the reason on the record.
Resolved	Via a change order (the sum rose), a contingency or allowance draw (money moved inside the sum), or no change (priced out at nothing).

Change orders are records of executed documents — “Executed”, with no pricing and no “issue” action. Settling one resolves its selected events. The contract sum is always added up from the records, never typed in.

Every way of narrowing this register is a filter on the column it belongs to: the funnel on Number picks the type (PCO, CUR, AUR, CO), the one on Award picks the GMP, and the one on Status picks the state. Sorting Number groups by type and then runs in order inside it, so change orders and PCOs never interleave.

8.4 · Pay applications

Pay applications in four steps

Log. The signed G702/G703 PDF plus the period and total completed. The document is the record — the numbers just describe it. The G702 summary lines fill themselves in, but always yield to a typed value.

The review clock. Five business days from receipt, fixed at log time. Quiet at first, dashed at two days, solid past due — it informs, never blocks.

The validation panel. It shows the checks that passed, too — a clean application should look clean, not empty. It can hand off to a recent observation report.

Certify — full or partial, with the certified file — return to the contractor’s court, or send back.

In reviewWith contractorCertifiedCertified partialReturned

Retainage is tracked per award. Attachments are held as-is, never read into numbers. Corrections run R0 → R1 with a reason. Months that span several GMPs review together, as a parent application with children.

8.5 · Contingency & allowances

The allocations

Each award carries its own allocations — contingencies (the CM’s or the Owner’s) and allowances — each with a code, allocated amount, scope, and spec section. Every allocation reads Allocated · Drawn · Pending · Remaining, and each section sums its allocations the same way above them.

A draw (an amount plus a required narrative) is how a CUR or AUR resolves without moving the contract sum: Pending → Settled. Pending money is committed, not gone; it leaves Remaining the moment it is recorded and joins Drawn only when the use authorization is signed. Allocations belong to one award — a four-GMP project has four sets.

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