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The defects liability period ended fourteen months ago.He had five percent held as retention on a commercial fitout in Q...
24/06/2026

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?

His accountant sent through the BAS prep on a Thursday.Three jobs completed before June 30. All invoiced. All signed off...
23/06/2026

His accountant sent through the BAS prep on a Thursday.

Three jobs completed before June 30. All invoiced. All signed off by the head contractor. Not one of them paid.

Under how income works in this country, the money was earned when the work was done and accepted, not when it hits the account. So at tax time, it counts. GST is owed on it. Income tax on the net profit is owed on it.

He's looking at a tax figure that assumes he has the cash. He doesn't.
He made the calls. One builder said it's in the queue. One said processing next week. The third didn't pick up.

There's nothing unusual about this. It's happening to concreters and floor layers and bricklayers right across the country every June. The work is finished, the invoice is signed, but the money is still floating somewhere between "approved" and "your account."

What makes it worse is that the ATO isn't interested in the timing mismatch. The income was earned. The tax is due.

Tradies: have you ever owed the ATO on money that hadn't landed yet? Drop your trade and state below.

Most payment processes in construction look roughly the same. Subbie sends a claim. It goes to accounts. Someone reviews...
22/06/2026

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?

Most subbies have never run a credit check on a builder before quoting a job. Three checks are available to any subcontr...
21/06/2026

Most subbies have never run a credit check on a builder before quoting a job. Three checks are available to any subcontractor before they price a job. They are public, cheap, and most people have never done them.

A plumber in Melbourne started running these checks after being burned on a $44,000 outstanding claim. Six months in, he ran an ASIC search on a builder he was about to quote for a commercial fitout. Same director. Two prior liquidations. He walked away. That builder went into administration eight months later. His former colleagues who did that job are still chasing $290,000 between them.

Running these checks narrows the exposure before you mobilise. Paid closes what remains after the due diligence, structurally protected payment even when all the signals look clean.

If you wanna learn more on how to protect your next job's payment, click the link in our bio.

Every relationship on that list was a hedge against uncertainty.A head contractor in Queensland. Eight to ten active rel...
20/06/2026

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?

A builder's bank balance tells you almost nothing about your position in it.Say the account shows $380,000 on Tuesday. T...
19/06/2026

A builder's bank balance tells you almost nothing about your position in it.

Say the account shows $380,000 on Tuesday. That feels like a healthy business. Strip out what's already committed out of that same account and the picture changes. $120,000 in payroll due Thursday. $85,000 to a materials supplier on 14-day terms. $47,000 on an ATO payment plan. $68,000 in retention obligations from three prior subbies. And your $38,000 claim for completed, approved work.

The $380,000 is already spoken for. A shared pool with multiple prior claims drawing on it. By Friday it can be gone, and no individual creditor on that list necessarily did anything wrong or failed to pay attention.

Most builders are not dishonest. A general operating account is just structurally invisible to you. You cannot see how many other commitments are drawing on the same pool that your payment is supposed to come from.

What you actually need before you start a job is a guarantee that your payment has already been moved to a named, separated position before their bank account has a chance to change.

What information do you currently try to get about a builder's financial position before you mobilise on a new job?

Most subbies find out a builder has gone under the same way.Someone in the group chat says the site manager isn't answer...
18/06/2026

Most subbies find out a builder has gone under the same way.

Someone in the group chat says the site manager isn't answering calls. Someone else says they drove past and the machinery hasn't moved. By Tuesday afternoon there's a LinkedIn post from the finance team confirming voluntary administration. By Thursday there's a receiver on-site and a locked gate where your tools used to be.

That is the actual 72-hour human experience of finding out that $38,000 in completed, invoiced, approved work is now sitting in a proof-of-debt submission to a liquidator. Not the news story about a company entering administration, not the ASIC notice, not the creditor waterfall explained in a letter three weeks later.
The part that stays with you is the group chat. The rumour that moved faster than any official communication. The moment you realised you had been the last person to know.

Three weeks later a letter arrives from the liquidator. It tells you that you are listed as an unsecured creditor. It does not tell you what you will recover. Most trade creditors in these situations recover very little or nothing.

If you have been through this, or if you were on a site when something similar happened, what was the first sign you got that something was wrong?

Super now has a 7-day clearing window from payday. That kicks in 1 July.Progress claims still run 4 to 8 weeks. Payroll ...
17/06/2026

Super now has a 7-day clearing window from payday. That kicks in 1 July.

Progress claims still run 4 to 8 weeks. Payroll goes every week. Materials get ordered before the claim comes back around.

Builders call that timing gap cash flow. Liquidators call it the reason.

The legislation shrank one window without touching the other. For anyone running a crew and managing sub payments on top of that, the numbers just got harder to hold.

What does your current claim cycle actually look like? Days from submission to cleared funds?

The director of Open Projects Group said "deeply sorry" in public.75 staff. 10 active sites. Brisbane, Gold Coast. A com...
15/06/2026

The director of Open Projects Group said "deeply sorry" in public.

75 staff. 10 active sites. Brisbane, Gold Coast. A company people trusted their labour to. A Melbourne tiler who worked one of those jobs got a form letter from the liquidator instead.

No recovery figure was published. That is not an oversight. There is nothing to report. Open Projects Group collapsed on 29 January 2026. It was not the first. It will not be the last.

The headline is always about the company. The story is always about the people behind it. Have you been caught in one? Comment below.

The money was budgeted. The project was funded. You still waited 90 days.Think about what it used to take to move money ...
15/06/2026

The money was budgeted. The project was funded. You still waited 90 days.

Think about what it used to take to move money between banks. Physical paper. A fax machine. A two-day clearing window. Nobody questioned it because there was nothing else.

Then the rails changed. And the process that made it necessary just stopped existing.

The 90-day construction wait is the same artifact. The funds are committed from the day the project is financed. The only reason they don't reach you is the architecture, sequential approvals at every tier, each one waiting on the last.

When a verified milestone triggers the transfer automatically, the wait doesn't compress. It disappears. There's nothing left to wait for.

That's where construction is going. Comment or DM "PAID" below and we'll show you how it works for your next project. đź”’

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104 Maribyrnong Street, Footscray
Melbourne, VIC
3011

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