Wednesday, 4 PM. The crew's wrapping up and the site trailer smells like damp concrete and someone's leftover lunch. Steve's cell rings — it's the client on the Sherbrooke institutional reno. Four months in, four months left. Client wants a progress invoice by end of week.

Steve says he'll have it Thursday morning.

He opens his laptop. The Excel file loads slowly. Timesheets by week, a tab for materials, another one someone created back in February that nobody touches anymore. No running total by phase. No cumulative figure since day one.

He knows the contract value: $240,000. He doesn't know how much of it has actually been delivered.

He types a number into the invoice template. Sixty-five percent. Feels about right.

He hopes it is.

Progress billing vs. fixed price: two contracts, the same question

Two models dominate construction contracts in Quebec.

Progress billing: you invoice as work gets done. Phase complete, invoice sent. Usually tied to a payment schedule you both sign off on before the first day on site.

Fixed price: one number, one deliverable. You deliver the work, the client pays the agreed amount. All the flexibility is on your side — which is great when you're under budget and difficult when you're not.

Either way, the same question comes up every few weeks: are we where we're supposed to be?

If you don't have hours tracked by phase, the honest answer is: you don't know.

What you lose without phase-level tracking

Steve isn't sloppy. He tracks his hours. But his timesheets are organized by week, not by phase of the project.

That gives him a picture of recent activity. It doesn't tell him whether the project is making money.

Here's what that costs:

Invoices based on gut feel. If you don't know what you've delivered, you bill on impression. Too low: your cash flow takes a hit while the project is running at full tilt. Too high: you create friction with the client when the work doesn't match the invoice.

Surprises at the end. On a fixed-price contract, the final phase has a bad habit of arriving at outsized cost. The foundation came in on time. The framing too. But something in between went sideways — and you don't know what or when.

Arguments you can't back up. If a client disputes a progress claim and your best evidence is your estimate, that conversation goes badly. A running total of hours by phase is a fact. "We're roughly 65% done" isn't.

Three things that change when you track by phase

Add a phase field to your crew's clock-ins

If your crew is already clocking hours on site, add one more field: the phase. Demo, framing, mechanical rough-in, finish work — whatever matches how your project is structured. Five seconds at clock-in. What it gives you at week-end is completely different.

When hours are grouped by phase, you know what the foundation actually cost you. And if the framing is running over, you see it during the week — not after the last nail.

Compare actual hours to estimated hours mid-project

Your original estimate is in the bid somewhere. The comparison between what you planned and what actually happened is the only real measure of whether your contract is still holding.

A check at mid-project — not at the end — still leaves you room to act. Redeploy someone from one phase to another. Review the method on a task that's eating time. Have a conversation with the client if scope has quietly drifted. In the final week, none of those options exist anymore.

Tie your invoices to the numbers

Progress billing backed by actual hour tracking isn't just good for your cash flow — it's defensible. When a client asks where you stand, you can answer in two minutes. Not because you have a sophisticated project management platform, but because your crew logs time by phase and the totals are right there.

The invoice Steve sends on Thursday

The next time a client calls mid-project, Steve could have the answer before he even opens his laptop.

Not because he bought expensive software. Because his crew has been logging time by phase since day one — and the cumulative total is sitting there, in real time.

65%. Or 71.4%. Whatever the actual number is, he can back it up.

That's the difference between progress billing as a management tool and progress billing as a guessing exercise.

If you want to see how an 18-person crew built exactly this kind of visibility — and cut their monthly admin time by 91% in the process — the case study is here. And if you want to see Heuro's tracking features, that's here.

Key takeaways

Progress billing and fixed-price contracts both require the same thing: knowing what you've actually spent on each phase
Tracking hours by week gives you history — tracking hours by phase gives you a profitability picture
A mid-project check still leaves you room to act; by the final week, your options are gone
When a client asks for a progress update, a running hour total by phase is an answer — "roughly 65%" isn't
Adding a phase field to your crew's clock-ins doesn't change their day, but it changes yours