The claim that went out short
Eleven variations were approved during the month. Nine made it into the claim. The other two were approved in a meeting minute and a reply to an email, and nobody carried them across.
Claims going out
A progress claim has to gather from several places at once: the schedule of rates, measured work, approved variations, materials on site, and whatever was agreed verbally and confirmed in writing somewhere. Assembling that is a manual reconciliation, done monthly, under deadline.
Approved but unclaimed
Every variation with an approval, anywhere — formal instruction, email, meeting minute — checked against what is in the draft claim. The output is a short list, and on most jobs it is not empty.
Claimed but unapproved
The reverse, and the more dangerous one. Something in the claim without a traceable approval invites a payment schedule that knocks it out and damages the rest of the claim's credibility.
Consistency with last month
Percentages complete that went backwards, line items that changed description, quantities that do not reconcile with the previous claim. All of it looks like carelessness to a superintendent even when it is not.
The supporting pack
Photographs, delivery dockets, signed instructions and measurement sheets gathered against the lines they support, rather than attached as one 200-page PDF nobody opens.
Claims coming in
This is the side with a hard deadline attached. Every Australian state and territory has security of payment legislation. In all of them except the Northern Territory, a subcontractor serves a payment claim and you have a limited window to respond with a payment schedule — miss it and you can become liable for the full claimed amount regardless of merit. The Northern Territory still runs the older West Coast model, where a missed response goes to adjudication and is decided on merit instead.
The realistic failure is not legal, it is administrative. A claim arrives as an attachment to an email addressed to someone on leave. It sits unopened. By the time it surfaces the window has narrowed or gone.
What we do about it
Anything arriving that looks like a payment claim is identified on arrival, registered with its service date, and surfaced to a named person the same day — regardless of who it was addressed to or whether they are in the office.
We do not compute your statutory deadline or tell you what your obligations are. That depends on which state, which contract and which act, and it is a question for your lawyer. What we remove is the failure mode where nobody knew a claim had been served.
Retention
Retention is money you have already earned, held against defects, and released in stages tied to practical completion and the end of the defects liability period. On a portfolio of jobs it adds up to a serious amount of working capital.
It also gets forgotten, in both directions. Yours held by the principal, and the subbies’ held by you. Release dates sit in contracts nobody re-reads after handover, and a release that nobody asks for often does not happen.
Extracting the retention terms from each contract at signing, and putting the release dates on a calendar, is close to the cheapest possible cash-flow improvement available to a builder. It requires no new system and no behaviour change — only that somebody reads every contract, which is precisely the work that does not happen.
Talk about a pilot