Value the month and certify the progress payment

Open the contract and build its schedule of values from the bill's own items, carrying the code, the description, the unit, the quantity and the rate rather than a summarised version of them.

Why: Every month for the next two years is valued against this list. A schedule that summarises twelve bill items into one line saves an hour now and costs an argument every month afterwards, because nobody can show which part of the line was completed.

Record the period's inspections and note what was accepted and what was held back. Work that failed its inspection does not go into this month's valuation, and the inspection record is why.

Why: Acceptance is what a Chinese payment cycle is built on, and it decides what is allowed into this month's valuation at all. Claiming for work that has not passed is the fastest way to have the whole application sent back rather than the one line queried, and it is the inspection record that settles the argument about which it was.

Record what was completed in the period as progress against the work items, so the percentages exist before anyone opens the application rather than being decided while filling it in.

Why: A percentage typed straight into a payment application is an opinion; the same percentage recorded against observed work is a measurement. The difference is invisible in the month you do it and decisive in the month somebody disputes it.

Open the period's application and populate the percent complete from the progress you just recorded. Each line gets this period's quantity, this period's value and the running total; the header keeps gross, retention held, previously settled and net due recomputing as you go.

Why: Retention is the deduction the application holds for you, and holding it in the same document as the valuation is what stops the two drifting apart. Anything else your contract deducts - advance payment recovery, owner-supplied material, site utilities, the wage account carve-out - is yours to apply, and you should agree those figures with the other side in the same conversation as the valuation, not after it.

Submit the application, then have it certified by somebody other than the person who prepared it. Certification is a separate action under a separate permission, and rejection back to the preparer is available while it is still submitted.

Why: The supervising engineer's signature on a Chinese payment is the moment the amount stops being a request and becomes a certified figure, and the structural part of that ritual is that a different person performs it, on the record, at a known time. One person preparing and approving their own application is the control failure auditors look for first.

The certified amount lands in finance as a payable without being re-entered. Raise the invoice against it with the tax rate on each line, and keep the fapiao you issue to the buyer tied to the same record.

Why: In China the buyer generally cannot process the money until the fapiao is in hand, so the tax invoicing chain is part of the payment cycle rather than an accounting afterthought. Re-keying the certified figure into a separate ledger is where a transposed digit becomes a payment nobody can reconcile at year end.

Open a clock over the application, but check first that a statutory one reaches you at all. The two Chinese regimes turn on who is owed: both cover a sum owed to a small or medium-sized supplier, giving thirty calendar days when the buyer is a government organ or a public institution and sixty when it is a large enterprise. Where both sides are large enterprises no statutory period applies and the contract's own dates govern, so read the clock off the contract rather than expecting one to be computed. For a progress claim the period runs from the date both parties confirmed the settlement amount, so enter that date as the application date rather than the date you posted the paperwork.

Why: Chasing late money starts with knowing exactly when it became late, and the regulation counts calendar days from a date that is easy to lose. Where your contract agrees a different period, put the agreed final date on the application instead: a public-sector clock cannot be extended past sixty days, and a private-sector one has to be reasonable rather than merely written down.