Claim From Cost

Your progress claim now builds itself from what the project actually spent this period. User story As a Contract Administrator, I used to build the head contract claim from a percentage I estimated line by line, so I can now prefill it from the cost the project has genuinely incurred and claim everything we have earned. Before The claim was a judgement call. You opened the schedule of values, looked at seventeen lines, and typed a percentage against each one based on what felt right, what the site manager said, and what you claimed last month plus a bit. Meanwhile the evidence was sitting one module away. You had certified fourteen subcontractor claims that period. You knew exactly what had been assessed, on which trades, against which cost codes. None of it reached the claim. The number you served your client and the number your project had actually earned were two different things that happened to be in the same building. The error runs one way. Nobody accidentally over-claims a line they forgot about. They under-claim it, the month closes, and the cash arrives a period late or not at all. After Open a new progress claim, switch the prefill source to Cost, and every line arrives with a suggested value derived from the cost that landed against its cost codes this period. Cost % sits on the schedule of values beside Claimed %, so the gap between what you have spent and what you have billed is visible before you type anything.Claimed % sits beside Cost % on every schedule of values line Where the figures come from Nothing here is estimated and nothing is invented. Every figure traces back to a subcontractor claim you certified yourself.From a certified subcontractor claim to a suggested claim value, in six steps Work in place is what you certified, not what was submitted. The platform reads the assessed value from your issued payment schedules, not the amount the subcontractor asked for. If a subbie claimed $40,000 and you certified $28,000, the driver uses $28,000. You never inherit someone else's optimism. The driver reads what you certified, never what the subcontractor submitted Supplier invoices are excluded by default. A delivery docket for materials sitting in a yard is not work in place, and under AS 4000 and NZS 3910 unfixed materials are only claimable on conditions. Including them would inflate every claim you serve. If your contract does allow materials on site, a workspace setting (Company Settings then Commercial then "Supplier invoices in the cost driver") turns them on deliberately. Excluded by default. Certified subcontract claims always count as work in place. Actuals reach the claim through the cost code. This is the join that makes the whole thing work, and you already did it at head contract setup when you mapped cost codes to schedule of values lines. A line can gather one code or twenty-six. Nothing new to configure. Both inputs sit on the Budget Register: $41,800 of work in place over a $395,000 forecast final cost The denominator is your forecast final cost. Cost % is work in place divided by the Forecast (FFC/EAC) figure already sitting on the Budget Register, so a code running over budget does not read as further along than it is. Both numbers are on one screen and neither is calculated inside the claim. You can check the percentage yourself in ten seconds. A worked example One real line, from certified claim through to suggested dollar. One line end to end: 10.6% applied to the $20,000 sell value gives $2,120 The step worth dwelling on is the last one. Cost sets the percentage. The dollar is always the percentage applied to the line's sell value. That distinction is the difference between a claim and a giveaway. On that line, cost is $10,000 and sell is $20,000. Apply the percentage to cost and you suggest $1,060. Apply it to sell and you suggest $2,120. The first version hands your client half your margin and does it quietly, every line, every month. Using it Pick your driver. The prefill source sits above the schedule of values. Programme is the default, and your choice is remembered per project. Switching between them recalculates the suggestions and leaves anything you have already typed alone. Set the cost cut-off. Subcontractor claim cycles rarely land on your head contract claim date. Subbies claim to the 25th, you claim to month end. The cut-off field controls which window of cost the driver reads, so the same claim opened tomorrow returns the same numbers. Set a default per project under Project Settings.Set the cut-off day once per project. Blank aligns it to the claim period end. The cost cut-off window, and the Programme or Cost prefill toggle Tick the lines you are claiming. Suggestions populate only where you tick. Every value stays editable and typing over one is expected, not a workaround. Every suggestion shows its working. Under each prefilled figure sits the derivation that produced it: the Cost %, the percentage already claimed, and the difference between them. You are never asked to trust a number you cannot take apart, which matters when a client asks how the amount was calculated. The suggested figure, with the derivation that produced it underneath Reading the flags Cost % on its own is a number. Next to Claimed %, it is a position. Under-claimed, front-loaded, and lines with no forward view Under-claimed is the one that pays for the feature. Cost has run ahead of what you have billed on that line, by more than the threshold (default 10 points). That is cash you are entitled to and have not asked for. Front-loaded is the one that protects you later. You have billed ahead of cost, which is a position you will have to defend at final account. Better to know in month four than month eleven. A dash means those cost codes carry no committed cost and no forecast, so no honest percentage exists. The platform shows a dash rather than a zero, because zero would be a claim about the line and a dash is an admission there is nothing to go on. What it will not do It will not claim for you. Front-loaded lines hold at zero rather than suggesting a negative, suggestions never exceed what is left to claim on the line, and a line with no Cost % is left alone rather than quietly falling back to programme. Each claim keeps a snapshot of the Cost %, the work in place and the forecast behind every line at the moment you wrote it. Certify more cost next week and the claim you already served does not move. Impact Under-claiming is the quietest cash leak on a commercial project, and it is invisible precisely because nothing looks wrong. The line was claimed. A number went out. Only the gap between that number and the cost underneath it tells you anything, and until now that gap was not shown anywhere. Under the Construction Contracts Act and the state security of payment acts you have to be able to show how a claimed amount was calculated. "Backed by these fourteen assessed subcontractor claims, against these cost codes, as at this date" is a materially stronger position than a percentage somebody felt was about right.