What Got Shipped Today - 7/8/26

7 August 2026 A Commercial day, almost end to end. Variations stopped being a one-way door, picked up the ability to serve a formal notice, and started reporting the sell side instead of the cost side. The subcontract Contract Summary learned to speak plain English. And dates finally read the way this part of the world reads them. Features Subcontractor variations get a status you can walk back "I do not want to create a variation and then approve it, because once it is approved I cannot take it back." Before. Two options, both terminal, and the product said so out loud: once you approve or dispute this variation, the status cannot be changed. So the safe move was to approve nothing, which quietly stalled every claim sitting behind that variation. "Disputed" was also not language anyone in a contracts team actually uses.After. Three states, Pending Approval, Approved and Rejected, applied consistently across the register, the filter, the status chip and the update modal. An approved variation that has not yet been claimed can be moved back to Pending Approval or across to Rejected. Once a claim has been raised against it, it locks and tells you why. The claim sheet now shows every variation with its status chip, including rejected ones rendered read only, so you can show a subcontractor the position on everything they claimed rather than only the ones that survived. Impact. Approving a variation is now a decision you can reverse while it still costs nothing to reverse it. That removes the reason people were refusing to approve anything, which is what was holding up the claims underneath. Variations can now serve a formal notice without leaving the record "The variation lives in Commercial. The notice that makes it contractual lives somewhere else. So I write it twice and hope the numbers match." Before. The head contract variation drawer created correspondence through the old notice system, and the subcontract variation drawer had no Correspondence tab at all. Two variation types, two different answers, neither of them connected to the Notices platform where the rest of the contractual record already lives.After. Both drawers now carry a Correspondence tab. Create Notice opens the Notices composer locked to the right type and prefilled straight from the variation: subject, description, value, the date a response is required by, and any drawings or documents already attached from the project CDE. Head contract variation notices are referenced as HVO and subcontract variation notices as SVO, matching the language on the commercial registers. Issued notices link back to the variation and list in the tab. Impact. The commercial record and the contractual record are now one click apart instead of two systems apart. The notice carries the same figures as the variation because it was built from it, so there is nothing to reconcile afterwards. Note. Recipients are not prefilled yet, so you still choose who a variation notice goes to. Subcontractor-initiated variation notices through the portal are not part of this release. Improvements The subcontract Contract Summary now reads the way a director reads it "If a third person is reading this, they will get confused. They will think that is what the subbie has claimed." Before. Claimed to Date and Scheduled to Date sat side by side at equal weight, with Claimed first and largest. Anyone who is not the contract administrator, a director, an external QS, a lender, read the biggest number on the card as the position. Compounding it, "Scheduled" is statutory language. It is the correct term for the amount a respondent proposes to pay, and it means very little to a reader who is not fluent in the Act.After. Certified to Date is now the primary figure on the card, renamed from Scheduled to Date. Claimed to Date becomes Claimed by Subcontractor and is demoted rather than removed, because the claimed-versus-certified variance is exactly the number you need the moment you are in a dispute. Paid to Date reads Paid to Subcontractor, and Retention Held has been lifted onto the card itself instead of sitting further down the page. The same labels now appear on the Subcontract Register tiles and the subcontract PDF export, so the language holds wherever the figures appear. Impact. No calculation changed. The card just stopped being readable only by the person who built it. Fixes Submitted subcontractor variations can be claimed on a hand-keyed claim Before. On the manual New Progress Claim screen, variations still pending approval appeared under their own heading with the checkbox and both amount fields greyed out. They were never counted in the selection, so they never reached the saved claim no matter what you did on screen. That hits hardest on the hand-keyed path, the one you use whenever a subcontractor serves their claim as a spreadsheet, a PDF or a photograph of a marked-up schedule of values, where there is no invoice to push through the register.After. Pending variations are now selectable and their amounts editable, counted in the selection total, and carried through to the saved claim with their grouping and status badge intact. The pending subtotal is shown separately and stays out of the certified total, matching how head contract claims already behave. Every pre-existing submitted variation across all workspaces was backfilled in the same pass, so this works on records created long before the fix, and no contract sums moved. Impact. The manual claim screen can now capture the same commercial position as the automated path, including a variation the subcontractor has claimed and you have not yet approved. Head contract variation figures now read the sell value Before. After cost and sell were separated on variation scope items, two places on the Variations page kept reading cost. The Financial Impact panel in the variation drawer showed the cost total as Variation Value and computed Revised Contract Sum from it, while the list view for the same variation correctly showed sell. Total Approved Variations summed cost. Percentage of contract disagreed between the drawer and the list, which is a hard thing to explain to a client. After. Variation Value, Revised Contract Sum, percentage of contract and the Total Approved Variations figure all read the sell value. Revised Contract Sum is original contract sum plus approved variation sell. Impact. The revised contract sum on screen is the one you can put in front of your client, and the drawer and the list finally tell the same story. Dates render day first on the Opportunity and Tender Trackers Before. Dates were rendering 7/28/2026 instead of 28/07/2026, and inconsistently: the Tender Register showed the correct format on screens where the Opportunity Tracker did not. This was a regression, not long-standing behaviour.After. Both trackers render DD/MM/YYYY. Impact. We build for local builders with local builders. A US date format undoes that claim in a single glance, and this was the first thing two separate estimators reacted to, unprompted, in the same week. Being Worked on. The broader date formatting standardisation across the rest of the platform is still in progress. If you spot a US-format date anywhere else, tell us and we will chase it. Something here you would change, or something you still need? Tell us through the feedback portal in the platform. Every entry above started as someone telling us what was in their way.