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How Progress Claims Fix Cash Flow on Bigger Jobs

By Luke Tadich · The Tradie Owner

You've got a $280,000 job running for fourteen weeks. Two chippies, a couple of subbies, materials going out the door every week. One invoice at practical completion. By week six you've paid four rounds of wages, three supplier accounts and a concrete pour, and you haven't seen a cent of the job's own money yet. The overdraft's doing the work the client's money should be doing.

That's not a bigger-job problem, it's a billing-structure problem. Small jobs forgive a lazy invoice — you're only out of pocket for a week or two either way. Bigger jobs don't forgive anything. String enough of them together, run three or four at once, and you can be turning over two or three million a year while personally bank-rolling half a million dollars of work in progress at any given time. The fix isn't a bigger overdraft. It's a proper progress claim schedule.

What a progress claim actually is

A progress claim is an invoice for work completed to a defined point, not for the whole job. Instead of financing fourteen weeks of labour and materials and hoping one final number lands cleanly, you're claiming the value of what's actually in the ground or on the wall right now, on a schedule both sides agreed to before the first ute turned up.

Done properly, the client is never more than a couple of weeks' work ahead of you in unpaid value. Done badly — or not at all — you're carrying the whole job's cash requirement yourself, interest-free, for the client's benefit.

Build the claim schedule into the quote, not the invoice

The single biggest mistake I see is treating the claim schedule as something you sort out once the job's underway. By then you've got no leverage — you're asking a client mid-job to agree to terms they never signed up for. It has to be in the quote or contract, in writing, before anyone picks up a tool.

1. Split the job into stages that mean something to your trade. For a build that's base, frame, lock-up, fit-off, completion. For a fit-out it might be demolition, rough-in, fixing, finishing. Whatever the stages, they need to be things a client can look at and agree are actually done.
2. Attach a dollar figure or percentage to each stage up front. Not "we'll invoice as we go" — an actual number next to each stage, in the contract, before day one.
3. Set the claim frequency in writing too. Either stage-based, or a fixed cycle — every two or four weeks — for anything where the stages themselves run long. Longer jobs often want both: a fortnightly claim for labour and materials on the go, plus the milestone claims for major stages.
4. Include a variations clause. Anything outside the original scope gets priced and agreed before it's built, then claimed the same way as the rest of the job — not bundled into a final invoice as a surprise six weeks later.

Retention: know it, don't fear it

On bigger jobs — especially anything running through a head contractor — you'll often see a retention clause: 5% (sometimes 10%) held back from each claim until the defects liability period ends. That's normal, and it's not the enemy. The trap is letting retention become vague — no stated percentage, no stated release date, no process for getting it back. Nail those three things down in the contract and retention is just a known, bounded number you can plan around, not a mystery sum that quietly evaporates.

Claim on time, every time — no exceptions

A perfect claim schedule on paper is worth nothing if the claim goes out three weeks late because everyone was flat out on site. The claim date has to be treated like payroll — it happens on the day, whether the job's ahead, behind, or on a knife edge. If you're running multiple jobs, put every claim date on one calendar and build ten minutes into someone's week to check it, because "I'll get to it" is exactly how a fortnightly claim schedule quietly turns into a monthly one.

Most states also give you rights under security of payment legislation to force a timely response to a progress claim if a client tries to sit on it. Know the basic timeframes for your state — they exist precisely so a builder or subbie isn't left waiting sixty days on money for work that's already done.

What changes when you get this right

Take that same $280,000, fourteen-week job. Structured properly it might be: 10% deposit, then five fortnightly claims of roughly $46,000 tied to defined stages, with 5% retention released 90 days after completion. Instead of carrying the whole job's cash requirement for fourteen weeks, you're never more than two to three weeks' work ahead of being paid. Run three or four jobs like that at once and the difference isn't small — it's the difference between an overdraft that's always maxed out and a bank balance that actually tracks how much work you're doing.

I built a trade business from the ground up before I did anything else, and this was one of the first structural fixes that changed how the business actually felt to run — not busier, not bigger, just no longer financing every job out of my own pocket while I waited to get paid for it.