Bill the month, not the job, and Texas starts counting for you

You close out a draw, you write "Phase 2 electrical, per contract, $18,400," and you send it. Six weeks later the money has not moved and somebody upstairs has questions about what exactly that covered. Now you are reconstructing March from photos.

That is the ordinary version of the problem. The Texas version costs more: that one invoice covered work from two different months, and in Texas the month is a legal fact. Your monthly notice deadlines under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.056 are counted from the month you furnished the labor or materials, not from the date you got around to billing. An invoice that blurs two months into one number cannot tell you which notice is due when.

A Texas construction invoice is doing three jobs at once. It is the written payment request that starts the 35 days under Chapter 28. It is the record of which month the work belongs to, which is what your lien notices count from. And it is where the ten percent the owner is holding either shows up as a tracked amount or quietly disappears.

Here is what goes on the face of it so all three of those work, and what the software does with each piece.

The invoice is the thing that starts the 35 days

On a private job, Tex. Prop. Code s.28.002 gives the owner until the thirty-fifth day after receiving a written payment request to pay it. Anyone in the chain who receives a payment covering a lower tier passes that share down by the seventh day. Overdue money accrues interest at one and a half percent a month under s.28.004, and those terms are not waivable by contract.

Read that first clause again. The clock runs from a written payment request, and your invoice is that request. A one-line invoice a reviewer cannot tie to the contract buys a conversation instead of a payment, and a conversation is not a clock.

So the invoice has a job before it has a total: be legible enough that the reviewer upstream has no defensible reason to ask a question. The running of that clock, the interest line, and the suspension notice that follows it are covered in getting paid in 35 days in Texas.

One month of work, one invoice

If you change one thing about how you bill in Texas, change this.

Under s.53.056, a sub or supplier sends a monthly notice for each month in which they furnished labor or materials. On a commercial job that notice is due by the fifteenth day of the third month after the furnishing month. On residential it compresses to the second month. Each furnishing month gets its own clock, and missing one does not kill the others: it kills that month's work.

Then the lien affidavit under s.53.052 runs on the same shape, from your last furnishing month: the fifteenth day of the fourth month after it on commercial work, the third month on residential.

Every one of those dates is counted from a month, so your billing structure is either feeding that calendar or fighting it. Bill one month per invoice and your invoice register becomes your notice calendar for free. Bill a phase that ran mid-March to mid-April as one line and you are back in your daily reports answering a question the invoice should have answered.

Where a draw genuinely spans months, stamp the month on each line instead. The full mechanics of the notice, including the statutory warning wording that has to appear word for word, are in the monthly notice that keeps your lien rights alive.

Write the description the contract already wrote

The description that survives a dispute is the one that matches paper the other side already agreed to.

Use the schedule of values line, with its number. If the contract says 16-A Branch Wiring, the invoice says 16-A Branch Wiring. A reviewer who can lay your line next to their own copy of the schedule has nothing left to ask you.

Bill change orders as their own lines, with the approval reference. An extra folded into a base line is an extra that gets argued about, and it takes the base line down with it.

Say the quantity and the unit. 340 linear feet at a rate reads as work. "Progress billing" reads as a request for trust.

Name the period. The month, or the from and to dates, on the invoice or on each line.

None of that is decoration. It is what makes the request answerable on its own, which is the standard Chapter 28 quietly holds it to.

Sales tax appears on the invoice, or it does not, and the contract decided that

This is the Texas one that catches people who have billed in other states, and it is decided long before the invoice exists.

Under 34 TAC Rule 3.291 and Tax Code s.151.0048, a construction contract is either lump-sum or separated, and that choice flips who is the consumer of the materials and therefore whether tax shows up on the face of your invoice at all.

State rate is 6.25 percent. Local city, county, transit and special-district rates stack on top to a combined cap of 2 percent, so the ceiling anywhere in Texas is 8.25 percent. On a separated contract the local tax on the materials charge is sourced to the jobsite, not to your shop. Bill a Fort Worth job at your Arlington rate and you are under-collecting on every draw, and the difference is yours to make up.

There is a trap in the conversion rule worth knowing cold. Separately stated prices anywhere in the contract, or in a document the contract incorporates, convert a lump-sum contract into a separated one. Separated invoices on their own do not convert it, unless the contract requires separated invoices. So the itemized estimate you attached to a signed lump-sum agreement can change your tax position, while an invoice you itemized to be helpful does not.

Then the labor grid, which decides whether the labor itself is taxable at all:

Scheduled, periodic maintenance to keep nonresidential property in good working order sits outside that bottom-right box: that labor is not taxable either. Which means a kitchen remodel and a retail buildout in the same week are two invoices under two different rules, and the difference is not a rate, it is whether a tax line exists.

That bottom-right box is also the second door into the permit. Nonresidential repair and remodel is a taxable service, so a contractor doing that work collects tax on the entire charge at the jobsite rate whether the contract is lump-sum or separated. Two different facts about a job, the contract election and the work type, decide the same thing: whether your invoice carries tax. The permit, the certificates and the filing side are in Texas sales tax for contractors.

Show the ten percent as held, not as missing

Retainage disappears when it lives only in the gap between what you billed and what landed.

On a private job s.53.101 requires the owner to reserve ten percent, through the work and for thirty days after the work under the original contract is completed. That money exists whether or not anyone talks about it. Putting it on the invoice as its own line does two things: your client sees an amount that is held rather than an amount in dispute, and you get a running total of what is owed to you later.

So the totals block reads as four numbers rather than one: subtotal for the period, tax if the contract election puts tax there, retainage held on this draw, amount due now. Underneath, retainage held to date on this job.

That last figure is the one worth watching, because the notice that reaches it has a short clock. A notice of claim for unpaid retainage under s.53.057 is due by the earlier of thirty days after your contract is completed, terminated or abandoned, or thirty days after the original contract is terminated or abandoned. The full sequence for claiming it, including the separate statutory fund, is in claiming the ten percent that is already yours.

Keep the delivery record, because Chapter 28 counts from receipt

The 35 days runs from the day the owner receives the request. Not sends, not posts. Receives.

That makes the send record part of the instrument. A timestamped email, a viewed record, a portal submission number or a signed transmittal turns day 35 into a fact. Without one, the argument starts with when did we get this, and that argument is free for them and expensive for you.

The record does double duty in the other direction too. Under the same chapter, money you receive that covers a lower tier's work goes down to that sub by the seventh day after you receive it, sub to sub as well as contractor to sub. Your receipt date is what that seventh day counts from, so the same timestamp that arms your interest claim upstream is the one that shows you paid on time downstream.

The same discipline carries into filing. If you do file a lien affidavit, s.53.055 requires a copy to the owner, and to the original contractor if that is not you, no later than the fifth day after filing. Since HB 2237 that copy can go by any delivery method, which makes the proof of sending the thing worth keeping rather than the postage class.

What the software does with all of this

AEC Stack builds the invoice from the accepted quote, so the description on the invoice is the description your client already agreed to, line numbers and all. Nothing gets retyped and nothing drifts between the quote and the bill.

The contract election lives on the job rather than on the invoice, which is the right place for it: set lump-sum or separated once and every progress invoice on that job comes out structured the same way, tax line present or absent to match. The jobsite address drives the local rate on separated work.

The furnishing month rides on the invoice, so your invoice list doubles as your notice calendar. Retainage is tracked per job with a countdown on the release and on the s.53.057 window, rather than as a difference you spot in February. Every send keeps a timestamp, so receipt is a record instead of a recollection.

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5 percent of each invoice processed through the platform, collected on the payment due date, which means it costs nothing until money is actually moving.

Do this on your next draw

Take the invoice you are about to send. Check four things: the month the work was done is on it, the descriptions match the contract's own line names, the tax line is present or absent because of what the contract says rather than because of habit, and the retainage is a named held amount instead of an unexplained subtraction.

Then put the furnishing month into the Texas lien deadline calculator and see which fifteenth is yours.

When you want invoices that come out this way without you checking each one, put your open jobs, their contract election and their held ten percents in one place: set up your business file.