Certifying a Progress Claim Is Not the Same as Confirming Work in Place

Every month, on most active capital projects, a progress claim arrives. It lists each line of the schedule of values, the percentage complete, the amount earned to date and the amount now requested.

The claim is reviewed. Arithmetic is checked, holdback is calculated, and the total is compared with the contract sum. A payment certificate is issued, and the owner pays.

Those are essential controls. They confirm that the invoice is internally correct. They do not, on their own, confirm that the work being paid for is in place.

That distinction matters every month. In Alberta, it now also runs on a statutory clock.

A progress claim is a percent-complete statement

A progress claim is a contractor’s statement of how far each part of the work has advanced, expressed as a percentage of each line’s value. It is usually prepared quickly, at the end of a billing period, by people who are also running the job.

It is not a measurement made by the owner. The owner’s confidence in it depends on whether the percentages match what other project records say about the same work at about the same time.

Those other records exist. Progress reports, schedule updates, site and inspection reports, delivery records, change logs and meeting minutes all describe the state of the work. They are rarely read side by side with the claim before it is certified.

In Alberta, the review now has a deadline

Alberta’s Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act came into force on August 29, 2022, and governs most construction contracts entered into since then. Alberta Municipalities has set out how its timelines apply to municipal owners. From the day an owner receives a proper invoice:

• 31 days: contractors must issue a proper invoice at least this often, subject to a testing and commissioning exception.
• 14 days: the deadline to issue a notice of dispute, in the prescribed form, with reasons for withholding all or part of the amount.
• 28 days: the deadline to pay. Undisputed amounts must be paid by this date even when part of the invoice is disputed.

Two features of the regime change how certification works in practice.

First, a contract cannot make payment of a proper invoice contingent on prior certification by a payment certifier or approval by the owner, except where the contract provides for testing and commissioning of completed work. The clock starts when the proper invoice is received, whether or not the certifier has finished their review.

Second, the consequence of missing the 14-day window is significant. Alberta Municipalities notes that if a municipality does not issue a notice of dispute in time, the contractor is entitled to payment of the full amount, even where the municipality has good reason to believe the amount is wrong. The contractor can use adjudication to enforce payment in about one to two months. The municipality can still pursue the question in court, but it pays in the meantime.

A question that surfaces on day 20 is not a dispute. It is a recovery exercise.

Review before certification used to be good practice. Under prompt payment it is a timing requirement.

What a schedule of values cannot show by itself

A claim can pass every arithmetic check and still raise questions that only appear when it is read against other records. Five are common.

Scope alignment

Does the progress evidence describe the same scope as the billing line? A progress report that says mechanical rough-in is about half done is not necessarily describing the whole mechanical line, which may also include equipment, controls and commissioning.

Date alignment

How far apart are the claim date and the evidence used to support it? A claim prepared at month end and a progress report written two weeks earlier can both be accurate and still disagree.

Stored materials

Is material on site or off site being claimed? Many contracts allow it, usually with conditions on storage, insurance, title and documentation. The question is whether those conditions are met and documented for this claim.

Pending changes

Is work under an unapproved change being billed under a base-contract line? Or are pending changes absent from both the claim and the cost forecast, so that exposure is building outside the numbers leadership sees?

Moved dates

Has a delivery, inspection or milestone moved in one record without the claim, schedule or forecast reflecting it? A late equipment delivery can make a line’s claimed progress less likely, and can matter for completion, though it does not establish a completion delay on its own.

Most differences have ordinary explanations

None of these questions implies that anyone has done anything wrong. Different reporting dates, different scope definitions and legitimately claimed stored materials are normal on a construction project. The purpose of reading the records together is reconciliation, not rejection.

Consider a hypothetical example. A mechanical line worth $694,000 is claimed at 62 per cent complete, or $430,280. A progress report written three days earlier describes mechanical rough-in at about 45 per cent, or $312,300. If both describe the same scope, the difference is $117,980.

Possible explanations include a narrower scope in the progress report, the three-day gap and stored materials. The right outcome may be full payment, payment of part of the line with the balance held pending verification, or a request for evidence that supports 62 per cent. That decision belongs to the payment certifier and the owner. What matters is that the question is asked, and answered, while the owner still has the option to act on it.

What stronger owner-side review looks like

Stronger review does not mean replacing the consultant, re-measuring every line or slowing payment to contractors who are owed it. It means that, for each claim, the owner team can see:

• which lines were tested, against which records, and as of which dates
• where the claim and the other records agree, so attention goes only to the lines that need it
• which differences remain unexplained, and the dollar value at issue
• who is resolving each one, and by when, inside the 14-day window
• what was decided and why, in a record that holds up with leadership, council and auditors

Most of that information already exists across the project. The work is connecting it in time.

From certification to confirmation

Vantage’s progress-claim review is built for this step. It reads each claim against the contract, the schedule of values, progress reports, schedules, change logs and delivery records, and sets out where they agree, where they differ and what the difference is worth, before the claim is certified. Every finding links to the page or line it came from, and an analyst reviews it before it reaches the owner.

It does not certify payments, determine entitlement or replace the consultant’s role. It gives the people who make those decisions a reconciled view while the window to act is still open.

Because the time to ask about a progress claim is before the clock runs out.