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A subcontractor working three jobs at once picks the general contractor who pays on time, every time. Not the one with the best plans or the friendliest PM. Whether last month's bill cleared on schedule.
Most construction AP breaks in the same few places. A bill comes in for materials or a completed phase, and someone has to figure out which job it belongs to, which cost code it hits, and whether the amount matches what was proposed. For a company running four or five active jobs, that's manual triage done from memory or a spreadsheet. For a company running fifteen, it's a full-time job.
In a market like PJB's, where hurricane-driven rebuild demand has every GC bidding for the same limited pool of subs, a subcontractor's calendar becomes a queue, and payment speed becomes one of the few variables a GC actually controls when they can't control who else is bidding for that sub's time.
MakersHub reads a subcontractor bill, codes it to the job and cost code it belongs to, and pays it without anyone needing to re-enter the same information twice. The rest of this guide covers where the process breaks and what a fixed version of it looks like.
Where subcontractor bills stall
A handwritten check sitting on a desk, waiting to be signed, is the easy part to notice. The coding step that happens before it isn't: a bill arrives with no clear indication of which job or phase it's for, and someone has to open the job file to figure it out before coding can even start.
Then comes the audit. Someone has to check that the right sub was paid the right amount for the right job, usually after the fact, and usually by hand. On a company managing concurrent projects, that reconciliation step is where a GC finds out about a cost overrun weeks after it happened instead of when it was still fixable. By the time they spot the error, the job it belongs to may already be closed.
What generic bill pay misses
Most bill pay tools were built for a company with one location and one chart of accounts. They code a bill to a vendor and a total, not to a job and cost code, which means a subcontractor bill still needs a person to open the job file and figure out where it actually belongs. They show spend after a job closes, not while pricing is still adjustable. They ask a subcontractor to create an account just to get paid, which is its own friction for a two-person crew with no time to learn a portal. And a bill that spans two jobs or two phases still gets split by hand, after the fact, rather than at the line level when it's captured.
The difference it makes for the person coding the bill
Every subcontractor bill lands in one place, coded to the job. Bill capture pulls the line items off a bill and assigns them to the job and cost code they belong to, without someone opening a job file to check first.
Spend against proposed pricing shows up while the job is still open, while there's still time to do something about a margin problem. Payment goes out without the subcontractor needing a login. A sub gets paid the same way regardless of whether they've ever touched MakersHub, which matters when the person on the other end of the payment is a two-person crew who doesn’t have time to learn a new portal.
From bill to subcontractor payment
- Capture
A bill comes in by email, upload, or a job site photo. Line items are automatically extracted. - Code
Each line is coded to the job and cost code it belongs to. A bill covering two phases of the same job splits correctly without a manual journal entry later on. - Approve and pay
Whoever owns the job signs off, and payment releases without a second manual entry into the accounting system.
Where do subcontractor payments break down?
PJB Construction, a residential builder working hurricane-driven rebuild demand in the St. Petersburg, Florida market, moved this entire process onto MakersHub and cut the gap between a bill arriving and a subcontractor getting paid down to same-day.
PJB isn't unusual. Most GCs managing subs still code bills by memory and pay by check. Fixing both cut hours off every week at PJB. It also meant subs answered the phone first when PJB called about the next job, ahead of the GC still paying by check.