AIA retention billing

Hello @Tcollins1968 ,

Construction projects are typically set up to invoice monthly with a Proforma invoice. The Acumatica Proforma invoices each have an AIA “Pay application” attached. Later when Retainage is released, Acumatica produces one retainage invoice for each monthly project invoice that has an unpaid retainage balance.

Combining released retainage onto one invoice is planned for a future version of Acumatica; please vote for the feature.

Please let us know if we can help you further.

@Tcollins1968 

From a projects perspective you can get 1 AIA, it’s on the AR side where several invoices are created. 

you can do this by going to the invoices tab of the project and select release retainage. 

Check the invoices that need to have retainage released (it can be all or some) and specify the amount to release in the “percent to release” column (in this case, we will release 100%) and click process:

release the newly created AR documents (this can also be found on the invoice tab of the project). this 

Once released, run project billing for a zero dollar amount and click “Print AIA Report” for review:

the retainage amount is reduced and the current amount due is updated with the payment amount:

as you can see, although we had 2 retainage invoice documents, the AIA combined the amounts (this would apply to however many lines you released). release the pro forma once it’s been reviewed (a zero dollar amount AR invoice will be created that you will need to release as well)

there are a ton of other retainage solutions I've worked on so if you have any others, I am happy to help!

@iqraharrison48 - thank you for these instructions.  I followed the steps and it did generate one billing for all the held retention.  However, it is not deducting a credit memo from the balance.  It shows the completed and stored to date number higher by the amount that should be subtracted out of the billing.  Our negative numbers are currently pulling as positive numbers, or are omitted all together.  Once this is fixed, I believe this way of billing retention should work.  Thank you!

@Tcollins1968 were the credit memos added as change orders or done through a AR/AP?

It was done through A/R as a billing reversal.  When we are in these screens and export into Excel, the credits are not shown as negative numbers.  Apparently this carries over into the AIA screen.  

@iqraharrison48 We ran into this same issue during our implementation and were told by our Acumatica support team that there was absolutely no way we could get AIA retention billings.

This fix worked perfectly. The only thing I would add is that the dates are very important for this. @Tcollins1968 had the issue with credit/debit adjustments, and I would guess it is because of the dates of the adjustments vs. the dates on the ProFormas. I noticed the same thing with the AIA retention. If the ProForma invoice date was on or before the date of the AR retention invoices, I could generate a retention AIA that showed a current payment due equal to the consolidated retention amount. But if the ProForma invoice date was AFTER the AR retention invoice date, then the AIA would show $0.00 in the current payment due. 

Another thing I noticed was that if you ran the AIA ProForma on an invoice date that already had a ProForma, then it would also show $0.00 for the current payment due. So for example, if I ran a normal project billing with pending values for March 2023 dated 3/31/23, then released the AR retention on 3/31/23, then ran the $0.00 project billing to get the retention AIA dated 3/31/23, I would get a ProForma AIA that showed a $0.00 current payment due. Alternatively, if I did the same thing as above, but released the retention on 4/1/23, and ran the $0.00 project billing dated 4/1/23, I would get an accurate AIA retention billing from that ProForma. 

This also partially solves the problem of not being able to consolidate retention billings, since the AIA kind of does it automatically (even though Acumatica technically still generates individual AR documents for each ProForma, which is an awful feature). I saw some other threads where people were mentioning that there customers were very frustrated receiving separate invoices for each retention billing. But almost all of our customers require the retention to be billed out on an AIA. They wouldn't even accept the official Acumatica AR retention invoice. 

Anyways, if you are affiliated with Acumatica, you should publish this solution ASAP because I do not think this is common knowledge within the Acumatica support team and it is an absolute necessity for the construction industry. God bless the current Acumatica construction users who are trying to make due without this. You guys are the real heroes haha. 

@Tcollins1968 sorry for the late response, i missed the email with your comment.

with that said, are the credit memos adding to the AIA or not impacting them at all?

We just learned that we were not doing our billing reversals correctly.  Making corrections in AR hit the AIA the proper way.  Thank you!

@Tcollins1968 i learned that the hard way too.  i made my own rule of thumb and say if it’s done in projects, do it in projects (specifically for billing)

@iqraharrison (Hi), We are testing this and followed your instructions and the AIA form still had 0 payment request.  We changed the system dates to make sure that the zero dollar billing is at least a day after releasing retainage.  We are on 2023 R2. Any one have any other suggestions?

Thanks

@saratvemuri are you trying to produce a retainage only AIA? could you provide screenshots? 

@iqraharrison yes we are trying to produce retainage only AIA. We followed your directions above.  Below are some screenshots.  Please let us know if you need more.