Applications, Notices, and the Dates That Actually Decide When You Get Paid

You buy the materials, you pay the lads on Friday, and the money comes back later. Everyone in the trade knows this. What decides how much later is not how politely you chase. It is whether a specific sequence of dated documents went out on time, and whether yours or theirs went out first.

An invoice is not an application

On most construction contracts the payment mechanism does not run on invoices. It runs on applications for payment, your statement of the sum you consider due at a given valuation date, and how you arrived at it. The invoice, where there is one, follows the agreed sum. Sending an invoice where the contract wanted an application is the most common own goal in the whole process, because it can leave you outside the mechanism that protects you.

The sequence, in the order it happens:

1. The valuation date. Fixed by the contract. Work is measured up to it.
2. Your application. The sum you consider due at that date, with the basis of calculation. Late is worse than approximate.
3. The due date. Set by the contract, usually a fixed period after the valuation date.
4. The payment notice. The paying party states the sum they consider due and how it was calculated. If it never arrives, your application can become the notified sum by default.
5. A pay less notice, if they want to pay less. It has to specify the sum they consider due and the basis for it, and it has to be in time. A late pay less notice is not a pay less notice.
6. The final date for payment. The date the notified sum has to be in your account. Not "the date they process it".

The periods in that sequence come from your contract. Where the contract is silent or non-compliant, the Scheme for Construction Contracts fills the gaps, under Part II of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 as amended. Two consequences worth knowing: an agreement to pay you only when the paying party has themselves been paid is generally ineffective, and non-payment of a notified sum carries a right to suspend performance on notice. This is a description of the machinery, not legal advice — read your own contract, and take advice before suspending anything.

Where it actually goes wrong

Rarely bad faith. Usually one of these:

• The application goes in late. Miss the valuation date and, depending on the contract, the sum can roll to the next cycle. One missed date can be a month of cash flow.
• The application cannot be checked. A one-line total invites a query, and a query buys the paying party time. A build-up they can tick off does not.
• Variations are in it that were never instructed in writing. They come straight back out, and they take the credibility of the rest of the application with them.
• Retention is not tracked. Half is typically released at practical completion and the balance at the end of the defects period. Nobody sends you a reminder. Contractors lose retention by forgetting it exists, not by being refused it.
• CIS is applied to the wrong figure. The deduction comes off labour, not materials, and only at the rate your verification returns. Getting it wrong in either direction creates work for somebody.

What a valuation should carry

Make it possible for the person on the other side to agree with you without doing any work. That is the whole technique:

• The valuation date and the application reference
• Measured works, priced against the contract rates, section by section as the contract documents set them out
• Variations as separate numbered lines, each with the instruction reference
• Materials on site, if the contract allows them
• Gross valuation, less previously certified, less retention, less CIS where it applies, net now due
• The VAT treatment, including the reverse charge where it applies
• Photographs of the work being claimed for

The photographs are not decoration. A valuation that shows the work is faster to agree than one that asserts it, and the questions that would otherwise come back a week later get answered in advance.

Where BuiltUp fits

Invoices are generated from the priced scope rather than typed again, so the figures on the application are the figures you quoted. A deposit, milestone or final invoice is built from the project's own numbers, and the client can pay it from the portal, BuiltUp takes no cut of the payment; Stripe charges their own processing fee.

What that does not do is change your contract. The valuation dates, the notice periods, the retention percentage and the defects period are all in the document you signed, and no software moves them. What it can do is stop the application being late because it was going to take an evening to prepare.

The short version

Get the application in on the date. Make it checkable. Keep variations instructed in writing and priced before the work. Diary the retention releases the day the contract is signed. That is most of it, and none of it is a payment terms clause. It is four dates in a diary.