When a subcontractor serves a payment claim on one of your companies, you record it here. It is not sent anywhere. The deadline for the payment schedule you owe in reply runs from the day the claim was served on you, whether or not you have recorded it yet. Recording it is what lets the platform track that deadline, and puts the claim in your schedule queue until you answer it. Record a claim as soon as it arrives.
Before you start
The head contractor features are switched on for an organization by paymentclaims.ai. They are not self-service, so if you cannot see them, contact us.
Once they are on, set each company that receives claims to Head contractor or Both under Settings → Contracting mode. Both is for a company that also claims on its own head contract, and it keeps everything it already does. The mode changes what the navigation shows first, and switches nothing else off.
You can record a received claim only on a contract where your company is the respondent, the party claims are made against. Owners, admins and members can all record one.
Recording it by hand
Open the contract, and on its claims panel choose Record a claim received. The form has four parts.
The claim as it arrived
- Their claim reference, exactly as it appears on their document.
- Claim period.
- How it reached you: by email, by post or by hand.
- Date served on you. This is the day the claim arrived, not today and not the date printed on it. The response deadline counts from this date, so it is the field to get right.
- Date they issued it, if the claim shows one. This is optional.
- GST, meaning whether their claim charges it.
What they claimed
This is a grid of the contract's items with their contracted value, what was claimed before, what is claimed this period and the retention withheld. A retention release, if they claimed one, goes in its own section.
Their claim document
Upload what they sent you, so that the record carries it.
Note
This is optional, and for your own reference only.
Record this claim saves it. If the figures look inconsistent with the contract, you are asked to check them before the claim is recorded.
Reading it from their document instead
Rather than typing the figures, you can have the platform read them. Choose Read it from their document instead, upload the claim, and choose Read this claim. The documents and the contract's items are read by an AI model, and the figures are matched against your contract's items.
Nothing is recorded yet. On Check what we read, every figure is marked as read off their document or changed by you, and each one is editable. A line that matched none of your contract's items is shown to you, not placed against the closest one.
Two things are always yours to enter, because a claim never states them: Date served on you and How it reached you. When you are satisfied, choose Commit and record this claim. Until you do, there is no claim and no deadline is counted. If the reading is wrong in ways that are quicker to fix by typing, choose Record it by hand instead.
Each contract can have one reading open at a time. If you start another, you are offered the earlier one first.
The schedule queue
Schedule queue in the sidebar lists every claim served on your companies that still needs a payment schedule, across every project. Each row shows the subcontractor, project, contract and claim, the date served, the deadline and the amount claimed. Deadlines are counted on each contract's own jurisdiction calendar.
Each row is tagged with how close its deadline is: Overdue, Urgent, Soon or Comfortable. You can filter the queue to one of those, and sort it by Least time remaining (the default), Earliest served or Largest claimed. With any sort other than the default, an overdue claim is not necessarily at the top. The Schedule column shows Prepare schedule until you start one, then In progress.
A claim leaves the queue only when a schedule is issued. Saving a draft does not answer the claim, and the deadline keeps running while a draft sits there. See preparing and issuing a payment schedule.
If the head contractor features are switched off for your organization, the claims you have already recorded stay where they are. They keep opening, and their deadlines keep being counted, but you cannot record a new claim.