Why RA bills get stuck, and what contractors can control

Ask any contractor what hurts most and it is not margin. It is the gap between doing the work and being paid for it.

Some of that gap is the client's process and outside your control. A surprising amount of it is documentation, and that part is entirely within it.

Where the delay actually enters

The measurement nobody agreed at the time

Work is done, measured later, and the measurement is disputed. Once there is a disagreement about quantity, the whole bill waits — not just the disputed line.

Measurements recorded and jointly signed as work proceeds are harder to dispute weeks later. This sounds like extra work and is the single biggest lever on payment speed.

Billing that does not line up with the BOQ

The bill has to be checkable against the bill of quantities, item by item. Where descriptions have drifted, items have been combined, or work has been billed under a heading that does not quite match, the certifying engineer cannot tick it off — so they query it, and the query costs weeks.

Keeping billing strictly to BOQ line items, in BOQ order, removes a category of delay entirely.

Variations done before they were approved

Extra work gets instructed verbally on site because stopping is impractical. Then it appears in a bill without a written variation order behind it, and the person certifying has no authority to pass it.

The work still gets paid for eventually, usually. But it holds up the bill it was attached to — and attaching unapproved variations to an otherwise clean bill is a self-inflicted delay.

Retention that is understood differently by each side

Retention percentages, release milestones and defect liability periods are in the contract, but if they are not tracked per bill by both parties, they get argued at exactly the wrong time. Contractors frequently discover they cannot say precisely how much retention is held across a project.

The cost side of the same problem

Everything above is about getting paid. The mirror problem is knowing whether the work was worth doing.

Project profitability is answerable only if material, labour, subcontractor and machinery costs are booked against the project — and ideally against the BOQ item — as they occur. Where costs are booked centrally and split later by estimate, the profit figure is an opinion.

The specific gap in most contracting businesses is subcontractor and labour cost against certified work. Subcontractor bills arrive on their own schedule, and unless they are matched to the same measurements you billed the client for, an item can be certified profitable while its subcontract cost has not yet landed.

What to put in place

• Measurements recorded and signed as work proceeds, not reconstructed at billing
• Billing structured on BOQ line items, so certification is a tick rather than an investigation
• Variation orders raised and approved in writing before the work is billed
• Retention tracked per bill, with release milestones visible to both sides
• Costs booked to project and BOQ item as they occur
• Subcontractor bills matched to the same measurements billed to the client

The uncomfortable summary

Most payment delay is not the client being difficult. It is that the bill, as submitted, gave the certifying engineer a reason to pause — and each pause costs a cycle.

Contractors who bill clean, against agreed measurements and BOQ items, with variations already approved, get paid faster than contractors who bill more aggressively. It is a documentation advantage, not a relationship one.

If you want to see how this is structured, see our construction ERP or book a demo.