Tracking payment

Issuing a claim is half the job. The other half is knowing which claims are outstanding, across every job, without going looking.

Recording acceptance

Client accepted this Claim marks the claim as agreed.

Tick it when the client has actually accepted — not when you sent it and not when you expect them to. An unticked claim is a visible prompt; one ticked hopefully is a claim you stop chasing for no reason.

The claims list

The List View shows every claim across your jobs: number, date, costing, value, and whether it has been accepted.

Reach it from the floating List View button.

Question	How
“What is outstanding right now?”	Filter unaccepted, sort by date
“What has this client been claimed?”	Filter by costing
“What did we invoice last month?”	Filter by claim date
“Which jobs are behind on claiming?”	Group by costing, look at the latest claim date

That last one is worth doing monthly. A job whose most recent claim is two months old is either finished or is not being claimed — and the second is far more common than anyone expects.

Chasing

The sequence that works:

1. Two days before due — a short reminder that payment falls due Friday.
2. The day after due — a note that it is now outstanding, with the claim reattached.
3. A week overdue — a phone call, followed by an email recording what was said.
4. Beyond that — whatever your contract provides for.

The two-days-before note is the one that works

Most late payment is not refusal, it is that nobody actioned it. A short reminder before the due date converts far more claims than any number of chasing emails afterwards, and it does not damage the relationship.

Keeping the record

Record every chase — a note on the claim, or an email you have a copy of.

If a claim ever goes to adjudication or a tribunal, the question is what was claimed and when, and what the client said in response. A file that answers that in order is worth a great deal; a memory of some phone calls is not.

Watching cash across the business

Two numbers are worth knowing at any moment:

• Claimed and unpaid — money you have invoiced and not received.
• Built and unclaimed — work you have completed and not yet invoiced.

The first comes from the claims list, filtered to unaccepted. The second is the dangerous one, because it is invisible: it is jobs that have passed a stage without anyone raising the claim, plus approved variations not yet included in a claim, plus unapproved variations where the work is already built.

A monthly review of the claims list grouped by costing surfaces the first part. Reviewing the variations list surfaces the rest.

When a claim is not paid

If a claim goes properly overdue, deal with it under your contract rather than by continuing to build. Every week of unpaid work increases what you are carrying, and a builder who keeps going while unpaid has usually lost the leverage to stop later.

That is a commercial and legal decision rather than a software one — but the record you need to make it is in the claims list.