Signifier une demande de paiement au titre du Construction Contracts Act

Record what was executed against each schedule item for the period as a percentage of its contract quantity. The earned quantity follows from that percentage and the design quantity, and the earned amount from the same percentage and the position total, so one honest number per line produces the whole valuation.

Pourquoi: A progress valuation built from a single project percentage cannot be checked and therefore cannot be approved without a conversation. Measured line by line, the disagreement is about one schedule item rather than about the whole month, and the rest of the money moves while that one is settled.

Read the valuation back against the bill and check the rates it used are the contract rates. Where a schedule item has been measured past the quantity the contract carries, deal with it as a change to the position with an order behind it rather than as a larger figure on the same line.

Pourquoi: A variation certified quietly is one the client can refuse at the final account, months after the work was built and paid for down the chain. Raising it as a change while it is small is the only version of that conversation where you are not asking to be paid for work already done.

Take the cumulative valuation, subtract what has already been certified, and apply retentions at the contract percentage. The figure that leaves this step is the one the payment claim is raised for, and the backup behind it is the measure that produced it.

Pourquoi: Interim payments are cumulative, so the month's money is a difference between two totals rather than a total of its own. Computing it from the cumulative figure is what stops a line being paid twice or dropped entirely when a period is re-measured. Retention money on a commercial construction contract is held on trust and has to be identifiable as such, and since October 2023 it has to sit in a separate bank account and be reported to the party it is held from. A figure that exists only as a deduction line on a claim is not identifiable, and the party who needs it to be is the one who is not holding it.

Raise the payment claim against the approved progress valuation, carrying retentions and any deduction the contract provides for, and reference the progress valuation on it. The claim has to state that it is made under the Act and say how the amount was calculated, and since 1 December 2015 every payment claim, commercial or residential, must also be accompanied by the prescribed Form 1 notice explaining the payer's obligations. A claim that does none of this is a request for money rather than a payment claim, and it carries none of the Act's consequences for ignoring it. The tax invoice follows for GST and is not the document the Act counts from.

Pourquoi: A demand for a figure nobody approved is one that will be returned, and the clock does not start on a returned document. Matching it to the progress valuation also means the accounts and the valuation tell the same story at year end without anybody reconciling them by hand.

Open a clock over the payment claim starting from the day the payment claim is served, under the Construction Contracts Act. Payment falls due 20 working days later, and the clock records that date rather than leaving it to be worked out when somebody asks. Twenty working days is the Act's default where the contract is silent. NZS 3910 and most commercial forms set their own shorter periods, and where they do the contract's date governs, so read the default the clock gives against the contract before relying on it.

Pourquoi: The single most expensive mistake in interim payment is starting the count on the wrong event, because every deadline behind it inherits the error and none of them look wrong. Anchoring on the day the payment claim is served once makes the whole chain checkable.

Read back the dates the Construction Contracts Act produces from the day the payment claim is served. The sum payable leads, the due date and the final date for payment sit under it, and the derivation spells out each date against the provision it came from, so every one of them can be quoted rather than asserted. Working days exclude weekends, public holidays and the year-end closedown the Act sets out, which is why a December claim does not answer on the same arithmetic as a June one.

Pourquoi: Deadlines that are typed in are deadlines that are typed in wrong, and a payment regime has more of them than anyone holds in their head. A derivation you can read out loud is what turns a phone call about a late payment into a quotable line.

Come back to the list as the month runs. It says how many clocks the project carries and how many are past their final date, badges the overdue ones and fills the breach register underneath. Open an overdue one and the findings name the sum outstanding, the days it has run past the final date and the rate interest runs at.

Pourquoi: Reading a clock is what writes its register, so a quiet register on a project nobody opens is telling you about the reading and not about the payments. Nobody misses a deadline on purpose; they miss it because the day it mattered looked like every other day. A claim nobody answered is worth more than a claim answered badly, and it looks like nothing at all until somebody counts the days. That is the one reading on this screen that turns silence into an amount payable.

When the clock has run out, give notice of intention to suspend and refer it to adjudication. The record the steps above produced, dates, approvals and the documents themselves, is the case, and it is assembled already rather than reconstructed under time pressure.

Pourquoi: The difference between a claim that is paid and one that is argued about is almost never the merits. It is whether the dates and the documents were kept as the work happened, because reconstructing them afterwards is expensive and looks exactly like inventing them.