Claims built from the contract
Progress claims are auto-numbered per contract and drafted from the schedule of rates, so a new claim starts from the contract’s own structure — not a blank spreadsheet.
From work done to money certified — without the spreadsheet ritual.
The progress claim is where delivery and money meet, and in most firms it is assembled by hand every month: values traced from a schedule, variations remembered or forgotten, retention recalculated in a cell someone once got wrong. Engis makes the claim a product of the record — built from the contract, carrying its variations, assessed and certified in a workflow, and tracked against statutory payment timeframes.
Two kinds of claiming, one system
Engis handles both shapes of getting paid. Professional-fee claims bill a consultancy’s work-in-progress to its client, flowing from draft through approval to a GST-aware invoice and, where the per-firm Xero integration is enabled, into Xero with payment status syncing back.
Contract progress claims are the heavier machine: AS 2124 and AS 4000 style claims made under a construction contract, with a schedule of rates, value of work to date, approved variations adjusting the contract sum, retention held claim by claim, and a formal assessment and certification step between claimed and paid. Engis models that machine properly — because approximating it in a spreadsheet is how firms end up defending numbers they cannot reconstruct.
Hand-built claims leak value and invite dispute.
A claim assembled from scattered sources inherits every gap between them. The variation delivered in week three is missing because it lived in an email. The retention line is wrong because the formula was copied from last month. The certified amount differs from the claimed amount and nobody can say precisely why. Each of these is a small dispute waiting for a bad month to become a large one.
- Claims rebuilt by hand from the schedule every cycle
- Approved variations missing from the claim they belong to
- Retention recalculated manually, claim after claim
- No clean record of what was claimed versus certified
- Statutory response timeframes tracked in someone’s head
- Payment status reconciled against accounts after the fact
How claims run in Engis
A real lifecycle
Draft, submitted, assessed, certified, paid — each claim moves through explicit states, so “where is claim 7” has an answer, and the history of every claim is inspectable.
Assessment and certification
Certification computes the certified value, retention held and net payable as a recorded step — the difference between claimed and certified is data, not an argument.
Retention handled properly
The contract’s retention percentage is applied against value of work to date on every claim, with retention held tracked claim by claim.
Statutory payment timeframes
Security-of-payment style due dates — payment schedule and payment timing — are calculated from the claim, so the statutory clock is visible instead of remembered.
Variation register
Variations tracked from identified through quoted, submitted and assessed to approved or rejected — as additions, omissions or provisional sum adjustments, valued as lump sum, schedule of rates, daywork or cost-plus.
Variations flow into claims
Approved variations adjust the contract sum on the next claim automatically, and each claim snapshots the variations it included — an audit trail of exactly what was claimed, when.
GST-aware documents
Claims and certificates generate as GST-aware, client-ready PDFs from the record itself.
Xero, per firm
An available per-firm integration pushes certified claims to Xero as invoices and syncs invoice and payment status back automatically — enabled per firm on request.
Who runs what
Contract administrators
The claim cycle as a workflow: draft from the schedule, submit, assess, certify — with the paper generated from the record.
Project managers
Variations captured the day they are identified, so scope growth converts to contract sum instead of goodwill.
Directors
Claims and variations reported across the portfolio — what is claimed, certified, outstanding and overdue — from the reports module, live.
Accounts
Certified claims arrive in Xero as invoices; payment status flows back. One reconciliation, done by software.
Why not keep the spreadsheet?
The spreadsheet has no states
A claim that is “sort of submitted” or a variation that is “basically approved” is how value leaks. Explicit lifecycles — claim by claim, variation by variation — are the discipline that stops it.
The spreadsheet has no memory
Engis snapshots the variations included in each claim at the moment of claiming. When the question is “what exactly did claim 5 include”, the answer is a record, not a reconstruction.
The spreadsheet is not connected
In Engis the claim sits beside the programme, the documents and the fee position it relates to — and pushes to the accounting system instead of being retyped into it.
Frequently asked questions
Does Engis support AS 2124 and AS 4000 style claims?
Yes. Progress claims are modelled the way those contract forms work: schedule-of-rates based claiming, value of work to date, approved variations adjusting the contract sum, retention applied per claim, and a formal assessment and certification step. Engis AI can also read AS 2124 and AS 4000 style contracts and extract key terms into the record.
How are variations valued?
As lump sum, schedule of rates, daywork or cost-plus — recorded as additions, omissions or provisional sum adjustments, and tracked from identification through quoting, submission and assessment to approval or rejection.
What happens when a variation is approved?
It feeds the next progress claim automatically: the approved total adjusts the contract sum, and the claim snapshots the variations it included so the audit trail is permanent.
Does Engis track security-of-payment timeframes?
Yes — statutory payment schedule and payment due dates are calculated from each claim’s dates, so responses and payments are tracked against the clock that actually matters legally.
Can claims go straight to our accounting system?
With the available per-firm Xero integration, certified claims push to Xero as invoices and payment status syncs back automatically. It is enabled per firm on request.
Claim from the record, not the ritual.
See a claim built, assessed and certified from a live contract — request sandbox access or book a 20-minute demo.
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