The payment notice that decides who owes what
Miss the notice and the notified sum becomes payable in full, whatever the work was worth. It is the cheapest money in construction to lose.
The payment notice is the most expensive piece of admin in UK construction. Under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act the payer has a fixed window to say what it considers due, and a payer who misses it becomes liable for the notified sum — the figure the other side applied for — regardless of what the work was actually worth. No argument about measurement survives a missed deadline, because the deadline is the argument.
Every contractor in the country either has been caught by this or knows somebody who has. It is not a technical dispute and it is not about quality of work. It is a date, and it was in a diary.
Why it keeps happening
Because the date is computed rather than given. It depends on the due date, which depends on the application date, which depends on the contract terms — and then the pay-less notice sits a further number of days before the final date for payment, which is itself a count from the due date. Four arithmetic steps, on a different contract for every job, done by somebody with eleven other things on.
A calendar reminder is not a control. It is a copy of the arithmetic, made once, by hand, and never checked against the contract again.
Computing it once, from the contract
CONSTRUX generates the whole statutory cycle from the contract terms: the due date, the payment notice deadline and the final date for payment, for every period, in one act. Every application submitted inherits the period it falls in, so the notice deadline arrives attached to the application rather than living in somebody’s head. A schedule whose notice deadline fell after its own final date for payment would be refused, because it is a schedule nobody can comply with.
And the rules on either side of it
Certification is where a valuation becomes a debt, so it is separated from whoever applied — not by role but by person, because a small business stacks roles on one person as a matter of course and separation between job titles is not separation at all. Nothing can be certified above what was applied for. Nothing can be paid above what was certified, in one payment or in two. A certificate cannot be paid twice.
None of that is clever. All of it is the kind of rule that only holds if something other than memory is holding it. What holds it here is a hash-chained record of every application, notice, certificate and payment in the cycle, in the order they happened.
See the record being made rather than described.
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