Reading a run of payment cycles on a contested project produces a short and repetitive list. The same mistakes appear across different projects, different forms and different businesses, and almost none of them involve anybody getting the measurement wrong. Finding which of them applies is the practical content of a payment and pay less notice review.
The encouraging part is that every item on the list is removable by process. None of it requires better surveyors; it requires a calendar, a template and a filing convention.
Served late by a day or two
The commonest failure by a wide margin. The assessment was done, the figure was right, and the document went out after the deadline because the deadline was calculated from the wrong starting point or simply missed.
Counting is part of the problem. Periods measured backwards from the final date for payment are easy to get wrong, and contracts differ on whether days are calendar or business days and on how a deadline falling at a weekend is treated.
The fix is to calculate the dates once at the start of the project for every cycle, write them down, and work from the table rather than from the calendar each month.
Where a project has run for a year without anybody checking, it is worth doing the exercise retrospectively. A pattern of lateness across many cycles is a different exposure from a single missed date.
A figure with no basis of calculation
The second commonest. A notice states a sum and says nothing about how it was reached, which invites an argument about whether it was a valid notice.
What is needed is modest: a short schedule, or a marked up copy of the application showing what has been allowed and what has not. Enough that a reader can follow the figure without asking a question.
Referring to a valuation that was not enclosed is a variant of the same problem. The basis has to travel with the notice.
So does any deduction. A figure that cannot be reconciled to the items described leaves the reader unable to follow it, which is the test the document has to pass.
Sent to the wrong person or by the wrong route
Contracts frequently name a recipient and sometimes a method. Contact details change during a project, roles change, and notices continue to go to whoever received the last one.
Email has made this worse rather than better, because it is easy to reply to a chain rather than to address a notice deliberately, and a reply inherits whoever was on the original message.
Checking the named recipient at the start of the project, and again whenever somebody leaves, takes minutes and removes the point entirely.
Where the contract allows service by more than one method, using the one that produces a record of delivery is obviously sensible, and it is free.
Saying what will be paid rather than what is due
A subtle one with real consequences. Most contracts ask for a statement of the sum considered due. A document saying that a payment of a stated amount will be made is answering a different question.
Under some contracts that difference decides whether the notice performs its function. The wording costs nothing to get right and is easy to get wrong when drafting in a hurry.
A standing template fixes this permanently, which is the argument for having one. The wording is written once by somebody with the contract open, and used every month by somebody who does not need to think about it.
Only serving a notice when there is a disagreement
A notice issued only in contentious months is both a risk and a signal. The risk is that the habit of not issuing one carries into a month where it was needed.
The signal is that the relationship has changed, announced by a document rather than by a conversation, which tends to harden positions before anybody has discussed the substance of the disagreement itself.
Serving every month removes both problems and makes the notices unremarkable, which is what they should be. On projects where this is the practice, nobody reads anything into a notice arriving, because one always does.
Mixing the two notices into one document
A payment notice and a notice to pay less do different jobs and have different deadlines. A single hybrid document intended to serve both purposes can fail to satisfy either requirement properly.
The cleaner practice is to serve the payment notice as routine in every cycle, and to serve a notice to pay less only where the position has changed since.
Each document then has one job, one deadline and one set of contents to get right, which is considerably easier to administer than a single document trying to satisfy two sets of requirements at once.
Removing the whole category
Four things do it. A table of dates for every cycle, built at the start. A standing template carrying the required statements. A named person responsible each month. And a filing convention that keeps the cycle documents together.
That combination turns the notices from a monthly judgement into a monthly task, which is what they should have been from the beginning. Tasks get done in busy months; judgements get postponed.
The substance underneath remains the valuation, and that is client side quantity surveying work rather than administration. The procedure only protects a position; it does not create one. Where a cycle has already gone wrong, the claims and dispute services address it as a defined piece of work.
Money held back on a payment cycle?
A payment and pay less notice review examines one cycle end to end: the application, the notices, the dates and what the contract actually required of each party.