Phases, Progress Invoicing, and Change Orders in QuickBooks Advanced

Construction accounting has a structural mismatch with general-purpose bookkeeping software. A commercial job is not one deliverable billed once. It is a sequence of stages, billed as each stage progresses, against an estimate that keeps changing while the work happens.

QuickBooks projects historically had no way to represent that. A job was a job. Budgets, estimates, and invoices sat at the top level, which meant the accounting record did not match how the work was actually being run or billed. Firms bridged the gap with spreadsheets and, for change orders, with email threads and verbal agreements.

QuickBooks Advanced added two features in its August 2026 release that address this directly, both presented at Intuit's "In the Know" session on August 20. They are aimed at construction, and they apply just as well to any project-based business that scopes work in stages.

Phases

A phase is a subdivision of a project that carries through the whole workflow rather than existing only as a label.

You break a project into phases, and the budget, the estimate, and the invoices all understand that structure. The estimate is built by phase. The invoice is built by phase. Job costing reports back to the same phases. Nothing has to be reconciled between a spreadsheet version of the schedule of values and the accounting version, because there is only one version.

Phases are editable after the project is created. Projects get rescoped, phases get added, removed, renamed, and merged, so being locked into the original breakdown would have made the feature unusable in practice. You edit them from the project details page.

AIA-style progress invoicing

Once a project has phases, progress invoicing has something to bill against.

When you create an invoice, you pull in the estimate and set the percentage of progress to bill for each phase. One phase might be at 100 percent, another at 40 percent, a third at zero. The invoice is assembled from those percentages, phase by phase, which is the structure an AIA-style application for payment expects.

The practical change is that percent-complete billing stops being a manual calculation. Previously this was a spreadsheet that computed the current application from the prior one, then got re-keyed into QuickBooks as a flat invoice, with the connection between the two living only in whoever built the spreadsheet.

Change orders

Scope changes on almost every job, in both directions. Change orders are the mechanism for recording that, and until this release they lived outside QuickBooks entirely.

A change order in QuickBooks Advanced is tied to its estimate from the moment you open it, so the original scope is already loaded and you are not hunting for the source document. You pull in only the lines that are changing. Added scope is entered as a positive quantity, removed scope as a negative, and the estimate updates itself. No recalculation by hand, and no second version of the estimate to keep in sync.

Once saved and sent, the change order sits in transactions awaiting approval, with an audit trail of what changed and when. That last part is the real value. A negative change order is the one your client is most likely to remember differently three months later, and a dated record of the reduced scope is worth more than a note in an inbox.

How the three fit together

The order matters. Phases give the project a structure. The estimate is built against that structure. Progress invoicing bills a percentage of each phase. Change orders amend the estimate, which flows into what remains to be billed.

Take any one of those away and the chain breaks. That is why they shipped together, and why adopting phases halfway, on some projects and not others, produces worse reporting than not adopting them at all.

What it does not solve

Reporting across jobs.

Everything above improves the record inside a single project. The questions a contractor's controller actually asks span projects. Which jobs are over budget. What the committed cost is across the portfolio. How much is billed but not yet earned. How this month moved against last.

Those are reporting questions, and almost everyone answers them in a spreadsheet rebuilt monthly from fresh exports. That rebuild is the job phases and change orders do not touch.

How you get there depends on how you track jobs. If you use QuickBooks projects, the reporting stays inside QuickBooks for now. If you track jobs with classes or locations, which is still how a lot of contractors do it in QuickBooks Online, the reporting can live in Google Sheets and keep itself current. Retriever pulls a Profit and Loss by class or by location, Budget vs. Actuals, and A/R Aging into a sheet and refreshes them on a schedule, so a per-job margin summary or a collections view against progress billings updates itself. It is read-only and works on any QuickBooks Online plan.

The setup is covered in Profit and Loss by class, Profit and Loss by location, and turning on location tracking.

Frequently asked questions

See also

Source: Intuit, "In the Know" live webinar, August 20, 2026, with features presented by Nithya Rathinam, principal product manager for mid-market verticals at Intuit.