Open a project trust account under the Building Industry Fairness Act

Record against the contract whether it is an eligible contract for a project trust under the Queensland Act: what kind of work it is, what it is worth, who the contracting party is and whether the contract engages subcontractors at all. Record who the trustee is, which on a project trust is the contracted party, normally the head contractor.

Why: The eligibility test has been widened in stages, so a company that correctly decided last year that a job was out of scope can be wrong about the same kind of job this year. The decision belongs on the contract record with the reasons, because the question comes back at the first audit and nobody remembers what was assumed.

Open the project trust account with a financial institution that offers them, name it so it reads as a trust account, and give the notices the Act requires within the periods it sets: to the commission, to the contracting party and to each beneficiary. Record the date each notice went and to whom.

Why: The notices are where this regime is most often breached, because opening an account feels like the task and telling people about it feels like paperwork. The Act treats them as the substance: a trust nobody was told about protects nobody, and the penalty attaches to the notice rather than to the money.

Treat the subcontractor directory as the beneficiary register: every subcontractor engaged under the contract is a beneficiary of the project trust, and each new one has to be told after they are engaged rather than at the next convenient moment.

Why: A beneficiary can ask to see the trust records, and the obligation to tell them is triggered by the engagement, not by the first payment. A register that is a month behind the site is a register that has already missed a notice, and the subcontractors added late in a job are exactly the ones added under pressure.

Deposit cash retention withheld from a subcontractor into the retention trust account rather than into working capital, and hold the balance per subcontractor with the date each part of it falls due for release. One retention trust account serves the trustee across its contracts, so the per subcontractor balance has to be readable inside it.

Why: Retention used as working capital is the practice the whole trust framework was built to end, and it is also the practice that collapses a chain of subcontractors when a builder fails. Held in trust with a release date per subcontractor, the money is theirs and the release is something the calendar produces rather than something a subcontractor has to ask for twice.

Run every payment to a beneficiary out of the project trust account, and withdraw the trustee's own entitlement from the same account only after the beneficiaries for that payment have been dealt with. Keep the payment record so each withdrawal can be traced to the amount it discharged.

Why: A trustee paying itself ahead of its beneficiaries is the failure the Act is aimed at, and it looks completely ordinary from inside a busy accounts department. The order matters more than the amount, which is why the sequence has to be built into how payments are run rather than checked afterwards.

Reconcile the trust account against the bank statement each month, keep the trust ledger, the notices given and the records of every deposit and withdrawal, and hold them for the period the Act requires so they can be produced to the commission or to a beneficiary who asks.

Why: The account review is not an audit of whether the business is solvent, it is a check that the trust was operated as a trust, and it is answered entirely out of records that either exist or do not. A month reconciled at the time takes twenty minutes; the same month reconstructed under a request takes days and still looks reconstructed.