How is a progress claim verified?

A progress claim is assessed by whoever the contract appoints to certify: a Superintendent, an Engineer or Certifier, or the head contractor's own contracts administrator or quantity surveyor. They check the claim against the contract's scope, the approved variations, the site records and the last certificate, in roughly that order, and the result of that assessment becomes the payment schedule.

Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where most avoidable trouble lives. Verification is a contractual and commercial process. The payment schedule that follows it is a statutory document with a deadline and a consequence attached.

Who does it

The title tells you something about the person's authority.

• Under AS 4000 and its relatives, the Superintendent assesses the progress claim and issues a Progress Certificate. The Superintendent is appointed by the principal and is required to act honestly and fairly in certifying.
• Under NZS 3910, the Engineer to the Contract did both the administration and the certifying. The 2023 edition split that role in two: a Contract Administrator acting for the principal, and an Independent Certifier who values and certifies. On a contract using the newer edition, the person deciding the money may not be the person you have been emailing.
• On most subcontracts it is the head contractor's contracts administrator or quantity surveyor, sometimes with a project manager signing off and sometimes with a QS engaged by the principal reviewing above them.

The glossary has the rest of the vocabulary, including the names contracts use for the reply itself.

What they check, and in what order

Each step gates the next, which is why a claim that fails early is reduced without much investigation.

Is it in scope. Every line is matched back to the contract's own schedule of rates or scope breakdown. A line that does not map to something in the contract stops here.

Are the variations approved. Variations are assessed against approval records rather than against the claim. An approved variation with a reference certifies. An instructed but unapproved one is normally held, and one folded silently into a base line is usually found and removed, which costs the base line its credibility as well.

Is the measurement supported. Percentage complete or measured quantity, against site records, inspections, delivery dockets and what the last claim said. Most of the negotiation actually happens here.

Does the arithmetic reconcile. Because claims are cumulative, this claim's opening position has to be the last certificate's closing position. Where it is not, the assessor is being asked to accept a total they cannot tie back to anything they issued, and the safe answer for them is to certify their own figure.

Retention. Recalculated to the contract's method and cap on the certified values rather than the claimed ones. This is the line most likely to be quietly wrong in either direction.

Set-offs. Backcharges, damages, rectification costs, often applied as a single figure.

Whether the claim is statutorily valid at all. Some assessors check this and some do not, and the ones who do are not doing the claimant a favour: a claim missing what the act requires does not carry the statutory reply deadline. See what makes a claim valid.

Why claims come back short

Roughly in descending order of how often it happens, and every one is preventable from the claimant's side.

1. The claim does not map to the contract's breakdown, so the assessor has to reverse-engineer the mapping before agreeing with anything.
2. Cumulative totals do not tie to the last certificate, usually because a previous reduction was never carried into the opening position.
3. Variations claimed without approval references, or claimed inside base lines.
4. No evidence attached for the measurement claimed, on a line where measurement is the whole question.
5. Retention computed differently from the contract, most often by ignoring the cap or by applying the base rate to variations the contract retains separately.
6. The claim arrived outside its window, which is a reason to certify nothing rather than a reason to certify less. Reference dates and claim periods covers both bounds.

What makes a claim certify first time

The same list inverted, and it is mostly about making agreement cheap rather than making the claim aggressive.

Claim against the contract's own line structure, in its words and its order. Carry previously certified forward explicitly and show it, so the reconciliation is done on the page rather than by the assessor. Give every variation its own line and its own approval reference. Attach evidence to the line it supports rather than as a bundle. Compute retention to the contract's method, cap included, so the assessor's recalculation lands on the same number. Is there a standard progress claim template? walks the document itself part by part.

And serve it the same way every month, on time, in a form the assessor recognises. Assessment is a person with a deadline and a stack of claims: predictable claims get read, unusual ones get held.

An assessment is not a payment schedule

This is the part worth carrying away.

A verbal "we have assessed it at $180,000", a certificate reducing lines without saying why, or an email saying the claim is with the QS are not necessarily payment schedules under the act, however genuinely they were meant. The act requires a document that identifies the claim, states the scheduled amount, and gives reasons where that is less than claimed.

If the statutory deadline passes without one, the respondent becomes liable for the full amount claimed, whatever any internal assessment concluded. When no schedule arrives sets out what that means, and the timing summary has the deadline for each jurisdiction with the section it comes from.

So the statutory clock is worth tracking separately from the conversation with the assessor. They run at different speeds, and only one of them has consequences attached. When the schedule does arrive and it is short, how do you respond to a payment schedule? picks up from there.