Run the Ontario prompt-payment clock down the chain

Raise the payment application for the period and check it carries everything a proper invoice has to carry before it leaves: the contract it is drawn under and its number, the period or milestone the money is claimed for, the work done, the amount, and the person it is to be sent to. Record the date it was received, not the date it was written.

Why: The clock starts on receipt of a proper invoice, so a missing element does not delay payment by a few days, it stops the clock from ever starting. The owner has seven days to object in writing and say what has to be corrected, and an invoice nobody objects to inside that window is deemed proper. Getting the elements right is the cheapest work in this whole case.

Open a payment clock over the application, pick the Ontario Construction Act regime, and enter the day of receipt as the application date. The due date is that same day, the final date for payment comes back 28 calendar days out, and the payment notice deadline comes back 14 calendar days out, each carrying the section it rests on.

Why: The date the invoice arrived is the only fact here and everything after it is arithmetic somebody has to do, usually three weeks later and under pressure. A window that crosses a long weekend is exactly where an honest hand count goes wrong, and these are calendar days rather than business days, which is the assumption most often carried in from another market.

Once the owner's payment reaches you, enter the date you owe each subcontractor, seven days on from the day you were paid, as a deadline against this claim. Enter it yourself: the statutory clock computes what the owner owes you, and the tier below it is a separate obligation with its own dates.

Why: The chain does not restart at each tier, it cascades, and the seven days start from the day the money reached you rather than from the day you get round to the run. Putting what you owe on the same register as what you are owed is what makes the gap between the two visible, and that gap is your working capital.

Open the subcontracts sitting under this claim and check that their payment terms run from the same event as the contract above rather than from a monthly cycle of their own, so the day you are paid is the day the seven days below start.

Why: A subcontract that pays on its own cycle puts you in default on a date you never chose, and the statute does not care what the subcontract says, because these timelines apply notwithstanding any other agreement. The trade below you is not waiting on your goodwill, it is waiting on a date the Act already fixed.

Send the objection, the notice of non-payment or the undertaking to adjudicate from the correspondence register so it carries a date, a named recipient and a copy, and file the reply against the same thread.

Why: The scheme turns on whether a notice was given, to whom and when. A notice of non-payment served late is no notice at all and the proper invoice must then be paid in full, so the date of service is worth more than the wording. A notice sent from somebody's own mailbox is one you cannot prove, and when two firms disagree about a date the one that cannot prove service is the one that pays.

Report what is owed to you and what you owe in date order, across every project and every tier, and take that page into the weekly money meeting rather than a set of aged balances.

Why: Cash on a construction job is a chain of dates rather than a balance, and an aged debtor report tells you what has already gone wrong. The firm that can see the whole chain at once is the one that stops financing the tier above it out of its own working capital, which is where most of the interest in this industry is quietly paid.