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Claims register & cost position
The claims register is the one page that answers where the money is. Every progress claim on the project sits in it with a lifecycle state, the cost-position strip at the top totals what has been claimed, certified and paid, and a reconciliation panel surfaces the variations you won but never billed.
Overview
On most jobs the money position lives in three spreadsheets and one person’s head. The claims register replaces that with a typed record: each claim carries its number, counterparty, period, the amounts claimed, certified and paid, and a status that can only move along the legal edges of the claim lifecycle. The register reads directly from those records — it is a rollup, never a parallel source of truth.
You reach it from the Registers band in the project sidebar, alongside the other registers for the project. The same band holds the obligations register and the commercial change register described on The Commercial Loop.
Why the position matters
Construction pays a 33.5-day average against a 27.4-day all-industry average, and the slowest 15% of payers take 68 days against 34-day terms (Payment Times Reporting Scheme, Cycle 9, Jan–Jun 2025). A live certified-but-unpaid figure is how you see that exposure before it becomes a cashflow problem.The claims register for a project — the cost-position strip across the top showing approved variations, claimed-to-date and an orange-highlighted Owed-to-us figure, with the claims table below it mixing submitted, certified and paid status badges.
The cost-position strip
The strip pinned above the table is the project’s money position at a glance. It is computed from the claims and variations on the register, so it is always as current as the records underneath it.
| Figure | What it totals |
|---|---|
| Approved variations | The value of variations the client has approved. |
| Pending variations | The value of variations still in draft or submitted. |
| Claimed to date | The sum claimed across your outgoing progress claims. |
| Owed to us | Certified minus paid on your outgoing claims — the money you are entitled to that has not arrived. This is the cashflow exposure line, and it is highlighted whenever it is above zero. |
| Subbie claims to date | The sum claimed against you on incoming claims. |
| Owed to subbies | Certified minus paid on incoming claims — what you owe downstream and have not yet paid. |
The strip tracks both directions of the money — what you have claimed up the chain and what subcontractors have claimed against you. A figure only earns its slot once it is real: zero-value counters stay hidden, and until the project has any live figure the strip does not render at all.
Raising and detecting claims
Claims arrive on the register two ways.
Raise one yourself
The New claim action opens a slide-over where you set the title, direction, counterparty, contract reference, claim period, the amount claimed, and — for an incoming claim — the date a response is due. Claim numbers such as PC-005 are generated automatically, in sequence per project and direction.
Let the documents register themselves
When a payment claim document is uploaded to the project, Alloovium detects it during ingestion and registers the claim for you. The register refreshes itself while open, so a claim that arrives in the document library shows up in the table without you re-keying anything.
Each claim opens into a workspace showing its line items and the evidence behind them, with line-level verification against the project record — a line is marked supported, contradicted, or flagged for you to verify, each with the citations it was judged on.
The claim lifecycle
A claim occupies exactly one of six states, and the register only offers the transitions that are legal from the state it is in. The same rules are enforced server-side, so the lifecycle cannot be skipped.
| Status | What it means | Can move to |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Under composition — not yet issued. | Submitted |
| Submitted | Issued to the counterparty. | Certified, Scheduled, Disputed |
| Certified | Assessed by the certifier. | Scheduled, Paid, Disputed |
| Scheduled | Answered with an issued payment schedule. | Paid, Disputed |
| Disputed | Contested by either side. | Submitted, Certified, Paid |
| Paid | Money received — the end state. | — |
The submitted → scheduled edge is the security-of-payment path: an incoming claim answered with an issued payment schedule needs no separate certification step. Every transition is recorded as an event on the project timeline, so the register doubles as an auditable history of when each claim moved and who moved it.
Disputed is a state, not a dead end
A disputed claim keeps its record — the amounts, the evidence and the correspondence — and can move back to submitted, certified or paid as the dispute resolves. See Claim Evidence for assembling the paper trail behind a contested figure.Incoming claims and the response clock
The register tracks claims in both directions. An outgoing claim is money you are claiming; an incoming claim is one served on you — and an incoming claim starts a clock.
Set the payment jurisdiction for the project (all eight Australian states and territories, plus New Zealand, are supported) and the register shows a response-clock chip against each incoming claim, counting down the statutory window in which a payment schedule must be served. Assessing the claim line by line and generating the schedule itself is covered on Payment schedules.
Approved but never billed
The quietest loss on a project is a variation that was argued, won, and then never appeared on a progress claim. The register runs that reconciliation for you: it checks each approved variation against the claims on the register and surfaces the ones that appear on none of them, with a total.
Approved variations are matched against claims
Each approved variation is checked for a reference on the progress claims of the project.
Unmatched variations are surfaced
Variations that appear on no claim are listed with their value, summed into an approved-but-never-billed total.
Weak matches are flagged, not counted
Where the match is uncertain, the row is labelled for you to check rather than silently included in the total.
It is a text match — read the method note
There is no stored link between a variation and the claim that billed it, so this reconciliation matches by reference text and says so on the panel. Treat the “check” rows as prompts, and confirm before you re-bill. When nothing is unbilled, the panel stays silent.Exporting the register
The register downloads as a spreadsheet (XLSX) or CSV from the toolbar, so the position can go into a month-end report or a client meeting without re-keying. For a narrative report built from the same records, see Monthly Report.