Projects in Practice: Application for Payment, Submittals, and More

In this episode of Mastering ServiceTitan, host Josh Lu sits down with returning guest Jennifer Alonso, Director of Marketing & Sales at Lowry Doors, to break down how her team uses ServiceTitan Projects to bring structure and clarity to complex garage door installation work. 

Alonso walks through how Application for Payment functions as a smarter way to manage deposits, progress billing, and partial invoicing without creating AR confusion. Instead of relying on spreadsheets or manual invoice edits, her team uses Application for Payment to control when and how revenue is billed, track materials and labor, and eliminate human error.

The mid-sized garage door company based in Utah used ServiceTitan Projects and related features to scale their commercial division from 2% in 2024 to 15% in 2025—and they’re now shooting for 25% commercial growth in 2026. Here’s how Lowry Overhead Doors is doing it.

Scaling commercial garage door installations

Prior to attending ServiceTitan’s Pantheon in 2024, Lowry mainly focused on residential garage door installation and service, with only a small percentage devoted to commercial garage doors. After attending Pantheon, Alonso says she was “inspired by everything we learned about commercial construction,” and returned with a renewed focus on growing the commercial side.

Lowry started by hiring a commercial estimator—”she’s just absolutely amazing”—and tasked her to use ServiceTitan Projects to go after more commercial bids. Until then, Lowry typically bid on commercial projects “by invitation only,” and on a very limited basis. 

“We kind of opened the gates and said, ‘We'll support you, we'll give you the time, the hours you need, please go for it.’ And she went. By the end of the year, we're making 15%,” Alonso says. “She went after these bids like crazy. I think she does probably like 30 a week.

“So, a lot of credit goes to her. Also, because of ServiceTitan, we were able to learn a better way, not only how to do the bids, but to understand them,” she adds.

Mind you, ServiceTitan Projects requires some setup and it’s not a one-click-and-you’re-done kind of thing, but the work you put in pays off.

“It changed everything, changed everything we did now. But we needed to do it. Just be okay with it and know that it’s going to change everything. And that's scary, but it's okay because it's worth it in the end,” Alonso says.

How to eliminate manual PO errors with Application for Payment

Before Projects, the garage door company struggled to track deposits and job revenue accurately, particularly on multiple-day jobs. 

“I think ServiceTitan Projects is really great for companies that have a lot of installations,” Alonso says. “If you're taking a deposit and not getting the rest of it for weeks, it really helps clean up the books.”

Lowry requires a deposit for both residential and commercial projects whenever the customer orders custom materials, which happens on most jobs. Previously, the Lowry team had to enter all of the information manually, including the purchase orders for materials.

This manual process exposed the company to:

• Confusing partial payments: The old process applied partial payments on full invoices, making AR look inaccurate and causing uncertainty about what customers actually owed.

• Hard to track incomplete work: Jobs with small unfinished items (like seals or warranty panels) couldn’t be billed partially in a controlled way, leading to missed or delayed collections.

• Manual, error-prone workflows: Excel spreadsheets, labels, and manual invoice edits were used to track deposits and purchase orders, creating high risk of mistakes and lost revenue.

What Application for Payment solved: 

• Enabled structured deposit and partial billing

• Automated procurement

• Provided clear AR tracking

• Enforced a standardized workflow between operations and accounting for reliable collections

“What Application for Payment does is, we instituted a process. We have project statuses, and they're set. You can't change them, you can't mess with them,” Alonso explains. “They are what they are, but they have customizable substatuses. And so our substatuses control all of our project workflow now. We create projects and it goes through a flow for the Application for Payment.

“The operations team, in their review they conduct every day of yesterday's work, as soon as they know a job is done and they make sure everything is just the way they want, then they go and they say, ‘Ready for AR (Accounts Receivable),’ and they move it on, and then our accountant knows, ‘Okay, I'm going to go make my final application for payment.’”

Alonso says ServiceTitan Projects was a challenge to kick off, but it wasn’t difficult or impossible.

“It’s just time-consuming,” she says. “But I think it was great, because it helped us catch a lot of our mistakes. The process wasn't quite what it should be. We really ironed out a lot of that on the residential side. I would definitely recommend, if you do a lot of installation or a lot of custom ordering, this is the way to go.”

Using Application for Payment in your commercial projects

Once Lowry got the residential side of Projects figured out, using it for commercial clients was simple. It not only helped them understand how to send and respond to an application for payment, but it also gave them confidence to submit bids on larger projects.

“All of the different portals and stuff that come with commercial construction, those things that were so confusing, now we’re like, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ It was really great to realize how much we had learned through ServiceTitan that applied in the rest of the world, not just our ServiceTitan bubble,” Alonso says. “It also financially makes it more viable, which I realize will not surprise anyone in commercial construction. 

“Just know this was a small part of our business. From 2% to now 15%. We learned a lot of hard lessons along the way, but right now we've got a half-a-million-dollar project out there,” she adds. “And what I see in these construction systems that our contractors use, like Procore or Building Connected and those other ones, it matches my ServiceTitan.”

Now, with structured deposits, partial billing, and automated procurement working seamlessly together, Lowry has set its sights on a 25% increase in commercial projects this year.

“It’s so much more efficient,” Alonso says. “This feels like a sustainable thing.”

Where Submittals fall in your Projects workflow

Submittals is a section within Projects that you can choose to have turned on. The submittals typically come from your sales or marketing team, and include things like professional brochures, warranty information, or even drawings from the manufacturer.

For Lowry, Alonso says Submittals is only turned on for the commercial new construction division to avoid any confusion with residential clients. All of the submittals for commercial new construction are uploaded into ServiceTitan, so the client can see everything in one place. 

Previously, the Lowry team had to chase down project and installation managers to answer technical questions about a project, such as height, width, headroom, or electrical applications needed.

“And then, of course, the worst would be one project manager would give you one answer, the other would give you another answer, and then their boss would give you a different answer, and it was your job to translate and it was awful,” Alonso says. 

Now, everything is contained in one place and the team can email or have an inner-office chat with managers to track down the information they need.

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.

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