Claims lodged in a head contractor's portal

Plenty of head contractors will not take a payment claim by email. They require it to be lodged in their own software: Payapps, Oracle Aconex, Procore, or something built in-house. You do not get a choice about it, and doing what your contract tells you to do is not a problem to be solved.

The problem is what it leaves you with. A subcontractor working for four head contractors has claims sitting in four portals, none of which knows about the others. Nothing tells you what you have claimed across the job, what retention is held, or which head contractor's response is due first, and the response deadlines are running the whole time.

You can record those claims here, so that one place knows. This page explains exactly what that does and what it does not do.

What recording one means

The platform calls a claim you lodged elsewhere an externally served claim, and labels it Externally served wherever it appears: in your claims lists, on your dashboard, and beside the deadline in your Needs attention feed. The claims register you can export carries the same fact in an Origin column, where it reads EXTERNAL: that sheet writes its status columns as plain values so you can filter and pivot on them.

Recording one is bookkeeping, not claiming. The claim already exists: you lodged it, and it had legal effect the moment it was served, whatever this platform does afterwards. What recording it does is bring it into your ledger and start counting its deadlines.

There are two ways to do it, and they end in the same place:

Type it in. You enter the claim line by line against your contract's own items, with the amount claimed and the retention withheld as the portal's document states them, plus the claim's reference from that document and the date it was served.

Read it off the document. If you have the portal's claim as a file, the platform can read the figures out of it and show you what it found, set against your contract's own items, so you are checking figures rather than working from a blank page. Every figure is yours to correct, and any line that does not match something on your contract is called out for you to place or to fix the contract for. The reading waits while you do, and nothing is re-read when you come back to it. When you are happy with it, one button records the lot: the claims land the same way as if you had typed them in, in period order. Nothing is recorded from that read until you press it. Reading a document costs nothing; see what it costs below.

Either way the claim lands on your contract's next unclaimed period, in sequence, exactly as a claim you made here would.

It is not "history"

The platform also lets you load historic claims at setup: the claims that came and went before you started using it, so your contract's opening position is right. Those two things sound similar and are not.

The difference is whether the claim is finished, not how old it is.

• A claim that was certified and paid two years ago is history. It records a closed outcome. The platform carries its figures in the ledger and nothing else: no deadline, no chasing, and no fee.
• A claim still waiting for the head contractor's answer is an externally served claim, even if you lodged it months before you ever signed up here. It is live. Its statutory clock is running, and tracking it is the whole point.

"Old claim, therefore history" is the natural assumption and it is the wrong one. If nobody has certified it yet, it belongs in the second group.

One thing to do in the right order. Recording a claim on a contract (a portal claim included) closes that contract's history, and the earlier periods can no longer be filled in afterwards. So where a job was already running before you set it up here, load its finished claims first and record the live portal one after. The record form warns you when a contract still has earlier periods outstanding, but this is much easier to get right at the outset than to unpick later.

What the platform does with it, and what it does not

It generates nothing and serves nothing. The head contractor's portal produced the claim document. There is no claim PDF of ours for that claim and there never will be one. The claim page says so in as many words rather than leaving you to notice an empty space. Your own copy of the portal's document can be attached to the claim as evidence, alongside anything else you keep with it.

It records how the claim was served. The service method is lodgment, and the date of service is the date you tell it. The platform cannot see the portal's clock, the same way it cannot see whether a letter arrived, so it asks you and records your answer.

Every deadline it tracks runs from that date. The claim goes into your Needs attention feed, the head contractor's response deadline is counted in your contract's jurisdiction, the reminders go out, and the claim appears in the register alongside everything else. Nothing in that arithmetic depends on where the claim was lodged.

It does not decide whether your lodgment was valid service under the Act. Whether lodging a claim in a head contractor's system counts as service turns on your contract's service clause and on the legislation, and that is not the platform's call to make. It counts from the date it is told, and the pages that name your next statutory step say so plainly rather than implying the claim was well served. That is a limit on what the platform asserts, not a suggestion that anything is wrong with your claim.

The clock, and what it is counted from

The head contractor's response deadline is counted from the recorded date of service on the claim: the date shown on the claim page, which is what every deadline on it derives from.

That is usually the day you lodged it, and it is worth knowing when it is not. Some acts deem a claim served before its window opens to have been served on the first day it could have been, so that serving early never shortens the other side's time to respond. Where that applies, the platform records the later date, because that is the date the legislation counts from, so the recorded date of service can sit a little after the day you actually lodged. The summary below says which jurisdictions do this, with the section it comes from.

Recording the claim late does not move anything. The deadline was set when the claim was served; recording it a week afterwards produces the same dates, with less of the window left to watch.

Here is what each jurisdiction allows, and the provision each figure comes from:

For what the deadline means once it passes, see when no schedule arrives. The limit above applies there too: the platform tells you the window has closed and what the Act provides, and does not determine whether your lodgment effected service.

Why the retention figure may not match

The retention on an externally served claim is what the portal withheld, transcribed from its document. That figure is what actually came off your claim, so that is what the ledger carries. The platform does not overwrite it.

It does check it. Your contract records how retention should be calculated, so the platform works out what that method would have withheld on the same lines and tells you when the two disagree, naming both figures, so you can hold the warning up against the portal's own document and see which one is wrong. It stays a warning, and the transcribed figure is still what gets recorded.

Two things usually explain a gap. The document was read wrong, which is the easier one to fix. Or the head contractor withheld on a basis your contract does not provide for, which is worth catching in the month it happens rather than discovering years in, the subject of when the numbers do not match.

When their answer comes back

Record the payment schedule against the claim exactly as you would for any other claim. Nothing about the recording step differs because the claim was lodged elsewhere. See recording a schedule you have received.

From that point the certified figures supersede the claimed ones in your running totals, the retention position updates, and the claim stops appearing in your Needs attention feed.

Fixing one you got wrong

An externally served claim stays editable until a payment schedule is recorded against it, and freezes afterwards. That is more forgiving than a claim served through the platform, which is immutable from the moment it goes out, and you are transcribing someone else's document here, so the platform assumes you may need a second pass at it. Editing is free, however many times you do it.

Two limits worth knowing. Once a claim has been recorded on your billing history it can no longer be removed: that entry is what stops one claim being charged twice, and it exists whether the claim was charged in full, included at the monthly cap, or waived at nil. Correct it by editing instead. And a claim recorded against the wrong contract cannot be moved to the right one; that one needs support, and the Help control in the app header has the link.

What it costs

Recording a claim you lodged elsewhere is charged like any other claim on the platform. What the fee pays for is the tracking (the deadlines, the reminders, the ledger, the register) as much as the document, and on these claims you get the tracking without the document, because the portal produced that.

Where one reading holds several claims, each is charged as its own claim, and you are asked once: the confirmation names how many claims are about to be recorded and what the total comes to before you press it.

Some things that are not charged: reading a portal document to fill the form, editing a claim after you record it, and recording the payment schedule when it comes back. And loading a contract's pre-onboarding history at setup is free: those claims are finished, so there is nothing to track, which is both why they are free and why they carry no deadlines.

The current fee, the monthly cap and the free trial are on the pricing page, and the Access Terms set out exactly which acts are chargeable.