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.
That's the cost in hours. The same gap has a second cost, and it lands on the claim.
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.
The ITP is the schedule that claim is assessed against. If yours gets filled in at close-out, it's a reconstruction, not a record.
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.
There is a defect-cost side to the same gap – a non-conformance caught at handover costs multiples of the one caught while the crew is still on site. That argument gets its own post: the hidden costs of lagging QA.
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.
How to stop payment claims being withheld for missing QA records
Not every claim is QA-gated. Where it is, nothing gets certified until the record behind the item is closed, so the fix starts with the contract.
Read the contract and mark the claim items that carry a QA condition. On most AU/NZ civil contracts that is anything sitting behind a hold point in the ITP, plus any item the Nominated Authority has said they will want the test results for. Those are the lines that get held.
Close the evidence per lot as the work happens. The hold-point release and the test result get captured against the lot on the day, by the person who did the work. A lot with an open check at month-end is not a claimable lot yet.
Keep the lot record and the claim schedule in step. If the claim is built off a schedule of lots and the QA lives in a separate folder, the two drift, and the Nominated Authority finds the drift before you do.
Send the record with the claim. The QA pack goes in with the schedule. If it only turns up after the query, the item is already held and you are now negotiating for money you had earned.
Treat an unevidenced hold point as an unclaimable item. If the release was never recorded, leave the line off. Carry it to next month's claim with the evidence attached. Arguing it this month without the evidence costs more than the delay.
Why claims get held in the first place has its own post: why progress claims get held.
See how CONQA keeps the record in step with the build – book a demo.
Withheld claims: the questions people ask
Why is my progress claim being held for missing QA records?
Because on a QA-gated contract the certifier can only certify what has been evidenced. If a claim line sits behind a hold point and the release or the test result is not in the pack, the Nominated Authority holds that item until it is. The work can be finished and sound. Until the record shows it, the item stays held and the rest of the claim moves without it.
What QA records can the Nominated Authority require before certifying a claim?
Whatever the contract and the approved ITP say they can. In practice that means the ITP for the lot with each check signed, the hold-point release records, the test results named in the specification, survey conformance where levels are specified, and photos tied to the lot. Under NZS 3910 or the AS 4000 family, they are not obliged to certify an item the record does not support.
How quickly can a claim-ready QA record be produced with digital QA?
The same day the claim is built, if the evidence was captured against the lot as the work happened. The record already exists. Producing it is an export filtered to the lots on this month's schedule, instead of days spent pulling photos off phones and matching them to test certificates. At MS Civil the month-end close-out that used to eat days now runs clean, and NZTA can see QA status without anything being compiled.