How to Write a Progress Claim (A Subbie's Guide)

Every subbie’s written a progress claim on a Sunday night with one eye on the footy. Get it wrong and you’re either leaving money on the table or handing the builder a reason to knock it back. Here’s how to do it properly, every time.

What is a progress claim?

A progress claim is your formal request to be paid for work completed on a contract to a certain date — as opposed to a lump-sum invoice for a finished job. It states how much of the contract you’ve done, what that’s worth, and what you’re asking to be paid this cycle. The builder or head contractor assesses it, certifies an amount (which may be less than what you claimed), and pays against that. (For how this differs from a payment claim or a plain invoice, see progress claim vs payment claim vs invoice.)

On a facades or glazing job that might run for months, the progress claim is how you get paid along the way instead of waiting until practical completion to see a cheque.

Step 1: Know your contract’s claim date and format

Before you write a word, go back to the contract. Most head contracts and subcontracts specify:

• A claim date (the day of the month claims are due, or a reference date tied to the program)
• A required format — their template, a specific spreadsheet, a portal like Procore or Cheops, or “in accordance with the schedule of values”
• Who to send it to and how (email, portal upload, hard copy)

If you skip this step and send a claim in your own format on your own date, you risk it being rejected outright or held over to the next cycle purely on a technicality. Builders with high subcontractor counts often won’t chase you for a compliant claim — they’ll just process the ones that came in right and let yours wait.

Some contracts also specify what has to be attached — a statutory declaration, subcontractor statement, proof of insurances current. Check the list every time; it’s cheap insurance against a bounced claim.

Step 2: Measure what’s actually complete

Pull up your schedule of values or trade breakdown — the document that splits your contract sum into line items (supply, install per level, sealant, glazing, flashings, whatever your scope was broken into). Walk through each line and work out, honestly, what proportion is done.

This is where the ITP records and stage sign-offs earn their keep. If your crew has been marking off installation stages as they go, you’ve already got a live record of what’s actually in the wall — not a guess reconstructed from memory the night before the claim’s due. Cross-check that against the schedule of values line by line rather than eyeballing a single “we’re about 70% through” figure for the whole job. A tower job especially needs this broken down by level; a shopfront might just be one line.

If you don’t have day-to-day records to work from, this is the step that eats your evening — trying to remember which levels got glazed last week and which are still waiting on flashings.

Step 3: Claim percent complete honestly

This is where claims go wrong in both directions.

Over-claiming — rounding 62% up to 75% because you’re confident you’ll get there by the time it’s assessed — gets noticed. Quantity surveyors and site supervisors doing the assessment walk the job or check photos against what you’re claiming, and if the numbers don’t match what’s actually built, the whole claim gets treated with suspicion, not just the inflated line. That costs you time now (a full re-assessment) and trust later (closer scrutiny on every claim after).

Under-claiming — being conservative because you don’t want the argument — is just as costly, quietly. It’s your cash flow you’re giving away. Materials and labour got paid for at 100% of their cost; there’s no reason to claim them at less than 100% of their value once they’re actually in place.

The fix is the same for both: claim what Step 2 actually showed you, line by line. If a level’s at 80%, claim 80%. Don’t smooth it, don’t round it, don’t pad it for the fight you expect at assessment. A claim built off real numbers is also a much stronger position if the builder does try to talk it down — you can point to exactly what’s built, on which date, rather than defending a guess.

Step 4: Include your approved variations

Any variation that’s been approved and not yet billed goes into this claim — not held over “for next time,” and not bundled into a separate invoice that might get lost in someone’s inbox. Most contracts require variations to be billed through the progress claim process rather than invoiced separately, so check yours.

Only claim variations that are actually approved. Claiming for work under a variation that’s still pending sign-off is a common reason claims get partially rejected — the assessor strips out anything without a paper trail and you’re left arguing about it after the fact instead of before. If you’ve done variation work and the approval’s stuck in someone’s inbox, chase it before the claim date, not after.

For more on getting variations paperwork right in the first place, see variations: how to document them so you actually get paid.

Step 5: Attach the evidence

A progress claim with no backup is asking the assessor to trust you, or to organise a site walk before they’ll sign off — and a site walk means your claim doesn’t get certified this cycle, it gets certified next time someone’s free to visit.

Attach what lets them certify from their desk:

• Dated photos of completed work, ideally organised by level or area to match your schedule of values
• ITP or stage sign-off records showing what’s been checked and by whom
• A breakdown that maps clearly to the contract’s schedule of values, not your own internal job codes

The goal is that someone who has never been to site can look at your claim package and see, line by line, why the number is what it is. The less digging they have to do, the faster it gets certified — and the less room there is for a dispute later about what was or wasn’t done by the claim date.

Step 6: Submit on time, in the right format

Submit on the claim date, in the format the builder actually pays against. A technically correct claim sent the wrong way — the wrong template, the wrong portal, addressed to the wrong person — can sit unprocessed for a full cycle while everyone assumes someone else is dealing with it.

If your contract or your state’s security of payment legislation gives your claim legal weight as a payment claim, that’s a separate question with its own rules that vary by state — see security of payment for subbies: the basics for that side of it. This guide is about getting the claim right and getting it in on time so you’re not relying on that fallback in the first place.

Common reasons claims get knocked back

• Wrong format or missed the claim date — administrative, but it’ll still cost you the cycle
• Percent complete doesn’t match the evidence — assessor’s photos or site walk contradict the numbers
• Unapproved variations included — stripped out, claim re-issued short
• Missing required attachments — statutory declaration, insurance certs, whatever the contract specifies
• Claim addressed to the wrong template or portal — sent as a PDF when the builder wants it entered directly into their system
• No supporting evidence — assessor can’t verify from the desk, so it waits for a site visit

Most of these are avoidable. None of them are about the quality of your work — they’re about whether the claim package makes it easy or hard to say yes.

The cost of a late or rejected claim

Missing a claim cycle isn’t a minor inconvenience — walk the actual timeline through and it adds up fast. Say your contract runs monthly cycles and 30-day payment terms, which is a common enough setup. Miss this month’s claim date by even a day, and the work you’ve done doesn’t just slip a few days — it waits for next month’s claim date before it can be submitted at all. Then it has to go through certification, which can take one to two weeks depending on the builder. Then the payment terms run on top of that, from the certified date, not from when the work was actually done. A few days late submitting can easily turn into eight or nine weeks before cash actually lands — call it roughly two months, for what should have been a routine payment.

For a small facades sub carrying wages, material accounts, and plant hire in the meantime, that gap is often the difference between a comfortable month and a stressful one.

A rejected claim is worse in a different way — it doesn’t just delay payment, it usually means redoing the work of pulling the claim together, this time under time pressure and with the builder’s guard up.

Getting the claim date, the format, and the evidence right the first time is the cheapest insurance you’ve got against both.

Where WNDW fits

Steps 2 and 5 above — measuring what’s actually done, then attaching the evidence — are the two that eat a Sunday night. WNDW builds the “available to claim” number automatically from the stages your crew has marked off on site, timestamped photos and ITP records already attached, and approved variations already rolled in. The claim date doesn’t have to be a scramble. Progress claims in WNDW.

FAQ