For builders

As a head contractor you are in the middle of the chain, and that is the thing that makes your paperwork different from everyone else's. Money comes to you from one side and goes out the other. You are the claimant on Monday and the respondent on Wednesday — running the same statutory clocks in both directions, on every job at once. Most of what goes wrong for builders is not a bad job. It's a date nobody was watching on one of those two sides.

You run the Act in both directions

The Security of Payment Act treats each contract separately. Your contract with the owner or principal is one relationship; each subcontract is another. You are a different party in each, with different duties and different deadlines — and they run at the same time.

Looking up

You claim, they answer

You serve a payment claim on the principal or owner. It must say it is made under the Act or none of the machinery starts.

They have 10 business days to give a payment schedule. If they don't, they owe the lot and can't defend it.

Your payment falls due 15 business days after the claim.

Looking down

They claim, you answer

Your subcontractor serves a payment claim on you. Your 10 business days start on the day it arrives — not the day someone opens it.

Every reason you have for paying less must be in that schedule. Reasons left out are lost for good.

Their payment falls due 20 business days after their claim.

The line you will be tempted to use, that does not work: "I haven't been paid by the owner yet." Pay-when-paid and pay-if-paid provisions are void in NSW. Whether money has reached you from above is legally irrelevant to what you owe below. Cashflow is your problem to manage, not a defence — and it is one of the most common ways builders convert a timing squeeze into an undefendable debt.

The obligation that reaches you personally: the supporting statement

When you serve a payment claim on a principal, you must attach a supporting statement in the approved form declaring that all your subcontractors have been paid what was due. Two approved forms exist — one for a standard construction contract, one for an owner-occupier contract.

Serving without it is an offence carrying a penalty up to 1,000 penalty units for a company. Knowingly giving a false one can carry imprisonment of up to 3 months. And it does not stop at the company: a director who knows a statement is false and fails to take reasonable steps commits an offence in their own right.

Which is a paperwork problem with a personal consequence attached. If you cannot see, on the day you sign, exactly what every subcontractor is owed and what has been paid, you are signing a declaration you cannot stand behind.

The rest of the contract runs on the same principle

Payment is where the deadlines bite hardest, but it is not the only place a date decides the outcome. A variation agreed on the phone and never written up. An extension of time claim that had a notice period buried in the conditions. A defect notice with a response window. The pattern is the same every time: the obligation exists, the clock runs whether or not anyone is watching, and the loss is not the argument — it's the right to make it.

The builders who don't get caught are rarely the ones with the best memory. They're the ones where the paperwork happens as a matter of routine, on the day, because a system does it.

Where to start

Getting paid — looking up the chain

Paying out — looking down the chain

A subcontractor has served a payment claim on you10 business days or fewer, what the schedule must say, which reasons work — and what happens if you miss it.

Insurance and the owner side

Two directions, every job, every month.

Claiming up and answering down at the same time is not hard because any single document is hard. It's hard because there are dozens of them, each with its own clock, across every job you have running. eSiteOffice drafts what the contract and the Act require, serves it the way the contract nominates, and watches both sides' dates — so the one that gets missed isn't the one that costs you. It opens in September.

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