Or any other contract from which you provide services and at doing so also subcontract another party arises from routines being different. The thing I encounter often is at least one party being slow or lazy in delivering not the service, but the invoice for it. 

The basis of accruals basis of accounting requires that transactions are recognized within periods they are received, i.e. when they are made or provided and not when there’s a document to prove it was bought. We have talked about the essentials of recognizing expenses within their appropriate period quite a lot and therefore I would focus on construction contracts in this matter now.

Work carried out under the conditions of a construction contract consists of various services being performed within stages and as they are completed, the work is accepted by the buyer. The general practice seems to be that once an expense from a subcontractor is accepted, it is only then recognized as a liability and an expense as opposed to when it should really be recognized within accounting is based on the period for which the work accepted was carried out. Say that the work was performed within November and you accept it within December. As such your expense should be initially provisioned for and once you receive the invoice you debit the provision and credit the supplier payables account.