In most industries, an invoice is simply an invoice. In construction payment management, a subcontractor invoice must undergo stages of verification before it can be approved for payment. Lien Officers must review waivers, Compliance Officers must verify compliance, and Project Accountants must confirm that subcontractor billing matches actual work completed.
This approval routing process is so ingrained in the construction industry, that we have a name for it – Application for Payment. A key benefit of using GCPay for payment management is the ability to define and enforce complicated approval routing workflows. There are several different ways that you can establish approval workflows in GCPay to fit your needs. Read on to determine which workflow is best for your company.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Multiple Reviewers
The most basic approval routing option is to require multiple reviewers. This will simply enforce that submitted items, like AFPs and SOVs, must be examined by a defined number of users before it is approved. To establish multiple reviewers, simply add multiple users to the project with the Reviewer permission.
Enforce a Specific Review Order
- Navigate to the Project Settings tab of the project level menu.
- Select a user with the Reviewer permission and set the Review Order.
Multiple Reviewers Without Enforcing Review Order
- Navigate to the Project Settings tab of the project level menu.
- Set the Review Order to “First” for all users with the Reviewer permission.
Advanced Options
Users can further customize their approval workflows and email notifications by clicking Show Advanced Options in the user project permissions.
Type
You can assign which items a user is responsible for approving. For example, the user above has been set as a reviewer for Schedule of Values and Application for Payment, but not Change Order or Invoice.
For Role(s)
You can assign roles for that user. For example, the user above has been set as the reviewer for Schedule of Values and Application for Payment submitted by the Subcontractor role (S). If you were using the Customers Feature (upstream billing), for example, you may set a user as the reviewer for items submitted by the General Contractor role (G).
Review when $>
This column allows a user to be responsible for reviewing an item only when it exceeds the value entered. For example, the user above is brought in as a second reviewer only when the payment application exceeds $100k.
Review Order
You can change the review order if you need the approval process to proceed in a certain order. For example, the user above is the first reviewer for Schedule of Values and the second reviewer for Application for Payment.
Approval Groups
Approval Groups in GCPay can be used to allow subcontracts to be separated into different groups with each group having its own set of approvers. Each project can have up to 26 separate groups. These groups are individualized for each project.
- Navigate to Project Settings in the project level menu.
- Click on Default Group in the Approval Groups column and assign an Approval Group designation for the user. Note: a user can be assigned to multiple Approval Groups/
- Navigate to Project Companies in the project level menu.
- Click on Default Group in the Approval Groups column and assign an Approval Group to the subcontractor.
If the Approval Group is listed in red, that indicates it’s missing either a user assigned to that Approval Group or there are no subcontractors assigned to that Approval Group.
Choose the approval workflows that best fit your project requirements to become more efficient and effective in your payment management process.
Email Notifications: Users who are assigned to specific groups will only be notified to approve items for their group. Approval groups do not apply to lien waiver or compliance notifications.