Four numbers you need from your own contract

Every argument about being paid late comes down to a date, and every one of those dates is counted from something. Not from the day you invoiced, and not from the day you finished. From four periods that were agreed when the contract was signed, and that almost nobody reads afterwards.

They are on the contract particulars page. Ten minutes, once, and every deadline for the rest of the job falls out of them.

The four

1. How long after the valuation date the payment becomes due. This is the due date, and it is the one everything else is counted from. Not the date you sent anything. Get this wrong and all three below move with it.

2. How long after the due date the money must actually be paid. This is the final date for payment. It is the day being missed when you say somebody is late.

3. How long the payer has to serve a payment notice. Here the Act does put a ceiling on it: a payment notice must be given not later than five days after the payment due date (section 110A). Your contract can be tighter, not looser.

4. How long before the final date a pay less notice has to arrive. And this is the one worth reading twice, because the Act does not set it at all. Section 111 leaves it to “such period as the parties may agree”. Whatever is in your contract is the number, and if your contract is silent the Scheme for Construction Contracts fills the gap.

Why nobody can supply them for you

Standard forms have standard positions, and software can print them. The trouble is that amended forms are the normal case, not the exception. A JCT with the payment period edited is still called a JCT. A contract built from somebody’s old quote might have a payment period nobody has looked at since.

So a program that fills those boxes for you is doing one of two things: repeating a standard position that may not be yours, or guessing. Either way the date it prints on a document with legal consequences did not come from your contract, and you did not check it.

That is why QScope asks. It shows the standard position for the form you picked beside the box as information, and leaves the box empty. Until all four are confirmed it will not print a statutory date and it will not let you issue. The friction is the point: it happens once, at the start, instead of on the day a deadline is disputed.

The case where none of this applies

The Act does not cover a contract with a residential occupier, meaning someone who occupies or intends to occupy the dwelling as their home (section 106). On that job there is no statutory payment notice, no pay less notice and no default machinery.

Which does not make the four numbers less important. It makes them more important, because on that job they are the only thing you have. There is no Act sitting behind your contract to fill the gaps, so whatever the two of you wrote down is the whole of it.

Ten minutes, this week

Open the contract particulars and write down four figures. If a box is blank, that is an answer too: it means the fallback applies, and it is worth knowing which one.

• Days from the valuation date to the due date
• Days from the due date to the final date for payment
• Days the payer has to serve a payment notice, capped at five by the Act
• Days before the final date that a pay less notice must arrive

Then check them against what you have been assuming. The gap between the two is where the money goes.

Where the information stops

Reading four numbers off a page is something you can do. Deciding whether an amended clause actually achieves what it appears to, or whether a contract that says nothing is caught by the Scheme, is not. If the contract has been edited and the sums are meaningful, that is worth an hour with a construction solicitor at the start of the job, when it costs an hour, rather than at the end, when it costs the argument.