Not everything you claim is scope out of the contract. An administration fee, a fuel adjustment, an amount agreed on site and settled per claim: these are real money on a real claim, and there is no contract item to put them against. A one-off charge is how you put one on.
A charge carries two things: a description you type, and an amount. That is all it is.
Adding one
Every surface that takes claim figures takes charges, in a section of their own beneath the work lines:
- The claim editor, when you are drafting a claim to serve.
- Historic claims, when you are entering the claims you served before you came here, because those claims carried administration fees too, and a transcription that left them out would start your ledger short by exactly those amounts.
- An externally served claim, when the claim went out through somebody else's portal and you are recording it here to track it.
- A received claim, when you are the one being claimed against.
If the claim came to you as a document and the platform read it for you, the reading never decides on its own that a line is a charge. An administration fee on someone else's claim looks like any other line, and guessing wrong would put money against the wrong contract item. Instead the line comes up as matching nothing in your contract, and this is a one-off charge is one of the answers you can give it.
What a charge is not
It is not a variation. A variation changes the contract's scope: it is named, it is approved or it is not, it holds items, and its value becomes part of what the contract is worth. A charge changes nothing about the contract. Put an agreed change of scope in as a variation, because it needs to be in the contract's value, and a charge never is.
It is not remembered between claims. A charge belongs to the claim it is on. If you put the same administration fee on every claim, you enter it on every claim. Nothing about it is stored on the contract.
It is not capped. A contract item has a value, and what you have already claimed against it limits what is left. A charge has no such ceiling, because next month's administration fee is a different charge rather than the balance of this one.
Retention is never withheld on a charge
Retention comes off contracted work. A charge is not contracted work, so nothing is withheld against it and it is no part of the base the retention is worked out on. The retention cell against a charge shows $0.00 and you cannot type in it. That is the figure, not a cell waiting to be filled in.
The same follows through everything derived from the contract's value. A charge is in no progress percentage, in nothing "remaining to claim", and in nothing that decides how much retention is due back to you. See how retention works for what is in that base.
GST
A charge is taxed like any other line. In the claim editor you can set the treatment on each charge, the same way you do for a work line, so a charge that is GST-free or out of scope can say so. On the transcription surfaces (historic, external and received claims) a charge takes your company's usual treatment, as the work lines beside it do.
After it is served
From the moment the claim goes out, a charge behaves like any other line on it. It is printed on the claim, it is served with it, and the head contractor certifies or rejects it line-by-line in their payment schedule. See recording a schedule you have received.
If you have connected Xero, a certified charge goes onto the tax invoice at its certified value, as a line of its own under its own name, posting to your default sales revenue account. It is never merged into the line for the job's work, even though the two post to the same account, and if your invoices list every claim item it sits under a heading of its own. If you have pointed particular contract items at their own revenue accounts, a charge does not follow them, since it has no contract item to follow. A charge the head contractor certified at nil does not appear on the invoice at all, which is the same thing that happens to a work line they rejected outright.