Paid

You priced the job. You showed up. The money you earned is sitting in someone else's account right now.

The builder may be honest. The payment rails are built this way. Work is done on credit, payment comes later, and the gap between the two is a gap that someone is financing.

That someone is you.

Every day between completing work and getting paid, the money you earned is inside someone else's operating account. That money is working for them right now. Better bank balance, lower overdraft, more room to operate. And you're the one financing all of it.

The construction industry runs on this arrangement so completely that most people inside it stopped noticing it. You quote a job, you start a job, and somewhere in the background you accept that you will extend credit to the head contractor for 30, 60, or 90 days, interest-free, unsecured, on nothing more than goodwill and the hope they don't go under.

In almost any other industry, this would be called a loan.

Check if your next job's payment is protected before you mobilise. LINK IN BIO.

The defects liability period ended fourteen months ago.

He had five percent held as retention on a commercial fitout in Queensland. Standard stuff. The defects period ran its course, no defects were raised, the period closed. That should have been the trigger for the funds to move.

He submitted his request for release. Then he waited. After a month, he sent an email. Polite reply: "Being processed." Another month. Follow-up: "We'll have an update shortly." He's sent three emails now. Still waiting.

$18,500. Money he earned, money that has legally cleared every condition for release, money that everyone involved agrees belongs to him.

In the meantime he's been carrying the gap with his trade credit facility at 18%. That's roughly $3,300 in interest paid so far, on money that was his before that interest clock started.

This is the part that doesn't show up in any payment dispute statistics, because nobody is disputing anything. The work was fine. The terms were met. The defects period closed clean. There's nothing to escalate because nothing has technically gone wrong.

The money just hasn't moved.

When did your last retention come back to you?

Most payment processes in construction look roughly the same. Subbie sends a claim. It goes to accounts. Someone reviews it, maybe. A transfer gets initiated. Subbie calls to check. Something is wrong. You start again. That is six steps before anyone asks what happened.

Paid runs on fewer of them.

Upload the contract before work starts. Set the milestones. Subbie lodges a claim against a verified milestone. The platform issues the payment schedule automatically. NPP rails settle same day or next day. Full record, visible to everyone, no phone calls needed to confirm it landed.

The old process breaks because it depends on the right person remembering to do something at the right moment, under schedule pressure, every single time. Paid runs on triggers, not memory.

Builders who've been through it, what's the most time-consuming part of your current process? The claim review, getting the schedule out, or waiting on confirmation the funds actually cleared?

Every relationship on that list was a hedge against uncertainty.

A head contractor in Queensland. Eight to ten active relationships per trade category. Not because he had eight jobs running at once. Because he knew that when a payment dispute flared up, and in his experience it always did eventually, a portion of those subbies would go cold. Pull back. Drag their feet on the next mobilisation. Start manufacturing disputes as leverage.

So he carried the redundancy. Eight subbies meant that if three went cold at once, he still had five he could call.

Two project cycles on Paid later, he runs five per trade. The defensive behaviour stopped. Nobody decided to cut the list.

The subbies who knew their payment was protected mobilised when he called. They were reasonable on variation negotiations because they didn't need to hold out as leverage against an uncertain payment. They quoted tighter because the risk premium that had always been buried in their numbers came out.

Same subbies. Better conditions. They responded to them.

Has payment certainty ever changed how you work with a contractor or a client?