We Talked to Hundreds of Contractors About Billing. Then We Killed AIA Support. We removed AIA G702/G703 from Staxen last month. Every other piece of contractor billing software is in an arms race to build a prettier AIA form generator. So before we shipped, I want to explain why we deliberately walked the other direction. We spent months in the truck with contractors The whole thesis behind Staxen came out of conversations. Not surveys, not focus groups. Actual conversations, in trucks, on job sites, at supply houses, over diner coffee at 6 a.m. before the crews showed up. Across about four months we talked to a few hundred contractors. Most weren't customers. They had no reason to be polite. We asked the same handful of questions every time: Where does your week actually disappear? What part of billing makes you want to throw your laptop into the dumpster? If you could fire one task tomorrow and never do it again, what is it? The answers were remarkably consistent. They were also nothing like what billing software companies seem to believe. What contractors actually complained about Here is what we did not hear: "I wish my AIA forms looked nicer." "I want a more flexible G703 layout." "If only the retainage column had a darker border." Not once. Not from anyone. What we did hear, on repeat: "I do the billing on Friday nights, after dinner. Estimates, invoices, following up on checks. That is my weekend gone before it starts." "The GC makes me fill out a G702 and a G703 for every draw. I do the work in a week and wait sixty days for the money." "I never actually know who has paid me and who has not. I found an invoice from three months ago the other day that nobody ever paid." "I send the bill on the 15th and get paid on the 28th if I am lucky. Meanwhile I am floating the material for the next job on a credit card." "I am great in the field and useless on paper. I do not need a better form. I need someone who handles the paper." That last one stuck with us. Contractors don't want better forms. They want fewer forms. AIA G702 is forms theater Here is the uncomfortable truth about AIA G702 and G703. They are mostly compliance ritual. They exist because some projects (public work, large commercial jobs, lender-financed work) require a standardized format for payment applications. That requirement is real, but it solves an architect's problem, not a tradesman's problem. The architect needs a uniform way to certify draws across many projects. The forms exist for them, not for you. For a sub, the G702 is homework the GC assigns you before they will release your money. For a trade contractor running a mix of residential work, service calls, and light commercial jobs, which is the vast majority of the contractors we talked to, AIA is not a help. It is paperwork on top of paperwork. And here is what every AIA-software vendor will not tell you: the AIA forms are downstream. The hard work happens before the form gets filled in. Pricing the job, getting the scope signed, documenting the change orders, billing the right milestone at the right time, chasing the payment. That is where the week goes. By the time you are typing numbers into a G703, the actual labor is over. The form takes ten minutes. Building software to make those ten minutes prettier was solving the wrong problem. What we built instead Once we accepted that contractors did not need a better form, the product roadmap got simpler. We invested everything into the upstream mess: Milestone billing tied to the signed estimate. Deposit, progress draws at the stages you name, final payment. Every invoice knows what has been billed and what is left, so you never have to reconstruct it from a spreadsheet. More on why that matters in how to get paid faster as a contractor. Invoices texted or emailed as portal links. The client opens it on their phone, sees clean line items, and pays right there. No PDF attachment, no printing, no check in the mail. Online payment by card or ACH built into every invoice, so getting paid is one tap instead of a two-week round trip. Automatic payment reminders that follow up on overdue invoices for you, so the awkward "just checking on that check" call never happens. Change orders signed from the phone, with the amount flowing automatically into the next bill. The output is a clean, professional invoice the client can pay with one tap. Not a G702. A normal invoice that makes sense to a normal client. For the jobs that genuinely require AIA (public projects, certain lender deals, GCs who insist on the forms) we tell contractors honestly: this product isn't for that paperwork. There are dedicated AIA tools for those projects. We would rather be excellent for the 90% of work that doesn't need AIA than mediocre for everything. What this means if you're shopping for billing software If your business is mostly public work, AIA-required commercial projects, or lender-driven jobs: keep using a dedicated AIA tool. Staxen is not going to help you. If your business is residential, light commercial, custom homes, or anything where the client is a regular human or a small developer: you do not need AIA software. You need something that handles the upstream mess and produces a normal invoice. That is what we built Staxen to do. The forms were never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was everything that happened before the form. We had to talk to a few hundred contractors to learn that.