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How much of your last progress claim got held?

 
Money you had already earned, sitting frozen while someone went looking for a photo.

Most contractors file that alongside fuel and wet days - a cost of doing business, nobody's fault. It isn't. It's a line on your claim for work you've already done.

When CONQA surveyed CCF member contractors across Australia for From Burden to Insight, the admin numbers came back worse than expected. Every respondent said client compliance and QA requirements had climbed over the past three years. 86% of engineers and supervisors now lose five hours a week or more to QA and ITP paperwork. And every respondent had hit rework in the last twelve months from letting the record fall behind - one contractor put the cost at up to $200,000; another ripped up asphalt they had already laid.

C+I

 

That's the cost in hours. The same gap has a second cost, and it's bigger.

A non-conformance caught during the work is straightforward to address. The crew is still on site, the area is accessible. The same defect caught at handover is a different problem. Other trades may have worked over the area, access has to be arranged, and what should have been a minor correction becomes a formal defect and a client conversation.

A lagging QA system does not cause defects. But it removes the early warning system that would have caught them while they were still cheap to fix

In civil, the hold point gates the claim. Nothing gets certified until the QA behind it is signed off, so the record sits between finished work and paid work. Chasing ITPs at the end of the month feels like admin because it happens at a desk. It's closer to debt collection.

Carolyn Gardner manages surfacing at MS Civil, a Waikato roading maintenance contractor working to NZTA state highway requirements. Her operation grew sevenfold in two years and ran more than 400 sites last season, each one needing spray sheets, chip and binder test results, and photographic evidence collated to support the claim.

"If the QA is not there, they can hold that item in the claim. When we're doing millions of dollars of work in a month, holding up millions of dollars of payment is not okay for a business of our size."

Carolyn Gardner MS Civil

Leave the gap open long enough and the record stops matching the job. One drainage contractor described rebuilding an 18-month-old job off phone photos with no levels shot, having to "change a few things just to make it close enough. We're not telling the true story." The work was sound; the record no longer showed it.

The contractors who have closed the gap stopped leaving QA to the end of the job. They capture the sign-off and the photo on site, against the lot, as the work happens, so the record keeps pace with the build. At MS Civil the month-end close-out that used to eat days now runs clean. Carolyn has about two days a month back, the extra full-time hire she was about to make didn't happen, and NZTA can see the QA status without her compiling anything.

If your work is invoiced on completion rather than claimed monthly, the pressure lands in the tender instead. "What's your QA system like?" is now a scored question on work that used to go on reputation, and the only credible answer is a record you can hand over.

Either way, the crews are good and the product is sound. What breaks is the proof, and in civil the proof is what releases the money.


 

See how CONQA keeps the record in step with the build..

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