What is a proper invoice under Alberta's prompt payment rules?

Alberta lists eight required elements: the contractor's name and business address, the invoice date, the period the work or materials were provided, a description of the work or materials, the payment amount requested, payment terms broken down by work and materials, the name, title and contact details of the payee, and a statement indicating that the invoice is intended to be a proper invoice. That last element is the one most invoices are missing, and the 28-day payment clock runs from receipt of a proper invoice.

How fast do I have to pay my subcontractors in Alberta?

Under the Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act, an owner must pay the contractor within 28 calendar days of receiving a proper invoice, and the contractor must pay each subcontractor within 7 calendar days of receiving payment from the owner. The subcontractor clock is triggered by a payment landing instead of by a calendar date, which is why matching received payments to project payables matters so much.

Do I have to file a T5018?

The CRA requires it if all of the following apply: your primary source of business income is more than 50% from construction activities, you made payments to Canadian resident subcontractors for construction services, and total payments in the calendar year to a given subcontractor exceeded $500 not including GST/HST. If subcontractors are paid through accounts payable against properly set up vendor records, the return is a report. If they are paid ad hoc, it becomes a year-end reconstruction.

Does ERP software handle construction holdback?

Partly. Holdback is a percentage retained from each progress payment that is owed but not yet due, so it needs its own balance sheet treatment and its own release trigger. General ERP systems handle it through a retention or holdback configuration on progress billing, and the release logic usually needs setup. Confirm during evaluation that you can see holdback outstanding by project and by subcontractor.

Is construction ERP different from construction accounting software?

In practice yes. Construction accounting software focuses on the ledger, job cost, and progress billing. An ERP adds purchasing, inventory, equipment, and often manufacturing or field service in the same database. Small contractors are often better served by dedicated construction accounting. Contractors who also fabricate, carry inventory, or run a service division tend to outgrow it.

ERP for Calgary Construction Companies

Quick answer: construction is the sector where an ERP earns its cost through two specific things. Job costing that includes committed cost and change orders, and an invoice-to-cash process that survives Alberta’s prompt payment rules. Since August 2022 the payment clock in this province is statutory, it starts on a document with eight required elements, and it cascades to your subcontractors in seven days. That makes billing a compliance function.

What Kinds of Construction Businesses Are We Talking About?

The word covers businesses with genuinely different software needs, and the right answer differs by segment.

Segment	What the operation looks like	Where software strain shows first
General contractors	Manage subs, hold the prime contract, run progress billing and holdback	Subcontractor payables, change orders, prompt payment cascade
Trades and subcontractors	Crews on multiple sites, billing up the chain, waiting on payment	Progress billing, proper invoices, cash timing
Civil and heavy construction	Owned equipment, unit-price contracts, quantities	Equipment cost allocation, production tracking
Residential builders	Repeating house models, options, supplier rebates	Purchase order control against a budget per lot
Mechanical, electrical, specialty	Fabrication plus site install plus a service division	The split between project work and service work
Restoration and insurance work	Third-party adjusters, scope approval, documentation	Approval trails and job documentation

The pattern that unites them is money committed before it is spent, work billed before it is complete, and cash arriving after it is owed. Every accounting problem in construction is a timing problem.

Prompt Payment Changed What an Invoice Is

Alberta’s Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act replaced the Builders’ Lien Act and applies to all new construction contracts in the province as of August 29, 2022. Most coverage treats it as a legal development. It is also a software specification, and that is the part contractors underestimate.

The statute runs on a proper invoice. Alberta lists eight elements it must contain:

The contractor’s name and business address
The invoice date
The period during which the work or materials were provided
A description of the work or materials
The payment amount requested
Payment terms broken down by work and materials
The name, title, and contact details of the payee
A statement indicating that the invoice provided is intended to be a proper invoice

That last one deserves attention. Your invoice has to say, in words, that it is intended to be a proper invoice. An otherwise perfect invoice missing that sentence may fail to start the clock at all, which means the protection the legislation gives you never engages. This is a document template problem, and a template lives in whatever system produces your invoices.

Then the timelines run:

Step	Deadline
Owner pays the contractor	28 calendar days after receiving a proper invoice
Owner disputes the invoice	Notice within 14 calendar days of receiving it
Contractor pays each subcontractor	7 calendar days after receiving payment from the owner

Read the third row carefully, because it is the one that breaks spreadsheets. The subcontractor deadline is not a date on a calendar. It is triggered by a payment arriving. To hit it reliably you have to know, the moment a payment lands, which project it belongs to and which subcontractor invoices on that project it releases. That is payment matching against project payables, and it is a core ERP behaviour that manual processes do badly under pressure.

The Act also creates an adjudication mechanism for disputes over valuation, payment, non-payment, change orders, and holdback. Adjudication rewards whoever has the better records. A contractor who can produce a dated trail of invoices, notices, approvals, and change orders is in a different position than one reconstructing it from email.

Lien deadlines changed too. Registration moved from 45 days to 60 days from the last day services or materials were provided, with 90 days for concrete work to reflect curing time. The 90-day period for liens against oil and gas wells and sites is unchanged.

This is general guidance and it is not legal advice. Confirm how the Act applies to your contracts with a qualified Alberta construction lawyer.

Holdback Is an Accounting Problem Before It Is a Legal One

Holdback is money you have earned, that your customer owes, that is not yet payable. It needs its own treatment on the balance sheet, its own aging, and its own release trigger. Contractors who track it in a spreadsheet column beside the invoice log routinely lose visibility of the total and chase it late.

There is also a phased release rule worth knowing. Where a contract provides for a completion schedule longer than one year and the contract price exceeds $10 million, owners must release holdback annually or on another phased basis specified in the contract. If you work on projects of that size, holdback release becomes a scheduled event to plan around instead of a lump at the end.

The reporting question to put to any vendor: show me holdback outstanding by project and by subcontractor, as of today.

T5018 Turns Subcontractor Payments Into a Filing

If your primary source of business income is more than 50% from construction activities, and you paid a Canadian resident subcontractor more than $500 in a calendar year excluding GST/HST, the CRA requires a T5018 Statement of Contract Payments for that subcontractor. The CRA is explicit that the requirement exists to promote compliance and reduce underground economy activity in construction.

The practical point is the same one that appears in every sector we cover. When subcontractors are paid through accounts payable against properly configured vendor records, the T5018 return is a report you run. When they are paid ad hoc from whichever account was convenient, it becomes an annual reconstruction with a real risk of missing someone.

Confirm your filing obligations and deadlines with the CRA or your accountant.

Why Job Costing Is the Whole Game

Job costing in construction means something more demanding than assigning expenses to a project code.

Committed cost is the number that matters. A purchase order issued and a subcontract awarded are money spent from a management perspective, even though no invoice has arrived. A contractor who sees only actual cost against budget is looking at a lagging indicator and will discover overruns after they are unfixable. Committed cost visibility, meaning budget against committed against actual, is the single most valuable report in construction software.

Change orders decide the margin. Work performed on a verbal instruction, billed later, disputed at the end, is where contract profit goes. The system needs to hold a change order from request through pricing through approval through billing, with dates.

Work in progress is a real calculation. Over-billing and under-billing against percentage of completion is how a contractor knows whether reported profit is genuine. Many small contractors never produce a WIP schedule, which is also why their year-end is a surprise.

Labour is billed and paid from the same hours. A timesheet coded to a cost code on a project should feed both job cost and payroll.

Which ERP Capabilities Map to Which Workflow?

Operational reality	The ERP capability that handles it	Notes for Calgary buyers
Proper invoices under the PPCLA	Invoice templates carrying all eight required elements	Ask to see the template. Add the proper invoice statement explicitly
The 28-day and 7-day clocks	Payment matching from receipt to project payables	The hardest requirement here, and the one to demo
Progress billing	Billing by percentage or by schedule of values	Confirm it handles previously billed and this period
Holdback	Retention configured on progress billing with its own balance	Ask for holdback outstanding by project and by sub
Change orders	Quotation or change order records linked to the project	Needs a dated approval trail for adjudication
Committed cost	Purchase orders and subcontracts reported against budget	Budget, committed, actual, in one view
Subcontractor payments and T5018	Vendor records with construction payment classification	The return becomes a report
Crew hours to payroll and job cost	Timesheets coded to project and cost code	Confirm the Canadian payroll path early
Equipment cost on civil work	Asset records with usage allocated to jobs	Relevant if you own iron
Fabrication in mechanical or specialty trades	Manufacturing orders with bills of materials	Where Odoo separates from lighter suites
GST on Alberta work	Canadian tax configuration	Alberta is GST only at 5 percent, and BC or Saskatchewan work raises place-of-supply questions

Our ERPNext vs Odoo vs Zoho comparison covers how the three main SMB platforms differ across the project and manufacturing rows, and Odoo in Canada goes deeper on the tax localization.

Where Does Standard ERP Fall Short for Contractors?

Prompt payment logic is always configuration. No mainstream ERP ships an Alberta PPCLA module. The eight-element invoice, the notice deadlines, and the 7-day subcontractor cascade all have to be built into templates, workflows, and reports. It is achievable and it is work, so put it in the scope document.

WIP and percentage of completion vary. Construction-specific accounting products treat WIP schedules as a first-class report. General ERP systems usually need that built. Ask to see one.

Estimating and takeoff live elsewhere. Quantity takeoff and bid assembly are specialist tools, and the sensible pattern is to estimate in your estimating software and bring the accepted budget into the ERP.

Union and collective agreement payroll is specialist. Rate tables, fringe calculations, and remittances under a collective agreement are a genuine gap in general systems.

Canadian payroll is missing in some platforms. On a labour-heavy contractor this is the largest cost line, so check it early. Odoo publishes no Canadian payroll localization, so Canadian payroll runs through a separate service.

Lien and notice tracking is not built in. Deadlines exist in statute and not in your software unless someone configures them.

Where Construction Ends and Field Service Begins

Plenty of Calgary contractors run both a project business and a service division, and the two want different things from software. Projects want budgets, committed cost, progress billing, and holdback. Service wants dispatch, work orders, recurring maintenance agreements, and same-day invoicing.

Trying to run service work through a project structure produces enormous overhead on small jobs. Trying to run projects through a work order structure loses the budget. Systems that handle both keep them as separate document types feeding one ledger.

If your revenue leans toward service, start with the field service software buyer’s guide and the field service software vs ERP comparison instead of this page, and see the field service software category page for the tool landscape.

What Should a Calgary Contractor Do First?

Do one exercise before booking a single demo. Take your largest active project and produce, for today, the budget, the committed cost, the actual cost, the amount billed, and the holdback outstanding. Note how long it took and how many places you looked.

Most contractors cannot produce committed cost at all, and that gap is the real finding. It explains more about why margin erodes than any software feature comparison will.

Then check one document. Pull your last invoice and see whether it carries all eight elements of a proper invoice, including the statement that it is intended to be one. If it does not, that is a same-week fix worth more than most of an implementation.

From there our Calgary software planning guide covers sequencing. Contractors doing energy work may also want the oil and gas guide, because invoicing through producer portals adds a constraint this page does not cover.

For companies that conclude Odoo is the likely path, the Alberta integrator checklist covers partner evaluation, and Calgary-based Solvync is one local option. Compare any partner against at least one alternative, and make prompt payment invoice templates, holdback treatment, and the Canadian payroll path explicit line items in every written scope you receive.

Disclosure: Solvync may have a commercial relationship with the Biztech network operator. Solvync implements Odoo and does not implement the construction-specific accounting products mentioned here, so treat that link as one vendor path among several.