The GC is not paying you. What to do, in order.

A draw goes out at the end of the month. Sixty days later there is no money and no answer, and somebody in your office has started a sentence with “we should probably do something about the Westside job.”

Most of what is written about this is written by attorneys, and it is written about the end of the story — notices, liens, suits. That is the right advice eventually and it is the wrong first move, because in our experience most late draws on commercial work are not disputes. They are administrative. The money is stuck, and it is stuck in one of four specific places.

Find out which one before you escalate. Where it is stuck decides who you call, what you ask for, and whether you are even asking the right company.

First: which of the four is it?

Lay out what you actually know, in this order.

One: it was never submitted, or it was submitted wrong. The cutoff passed on a Thursday, the person who sends the draw was out, and it went in a week into the next cycle. Or it went to the project engineer who left in August. Or the portal rejected it and the rejection notice went to a mailbox nobody reads. It is a common cause of a late draw, and it is the one nobody checks first — because checking it means the problem might be yours.

Two: it was submitted and never certified. The GC has it and their project accountant has not approved it. Nothing is in dispute. It is sitting in a queue, or waiting on a question nobody thought to ask you.

Three: it was certified at a lower number than you drew. They approved seventy percent on a line you billed at eighty-five, or they certified without the change order you were counting on. That is a quantity disagreement, which is a completely different conversation from a late payment.

Four: it was certified in full and not paid. This is the only one of the four that is actually a payment problem. Everything above it is a paperwork problem wearing a payment problem’s clothes.

You cannot tell these apart from a bank statement. You need, per draw, what you billed, what they agreed to, and what arrived — three separate numbers. Which is the reason to keep them as three separate numbers, rather than one invoice that is either paid or not.

Spend the first hour on your own side of the line

Before the escalating phone call, check the things that would make you wrong. It is the difference between a conversation you win and one where you get handed a list.

• Did the draw go in before the cutoff, by the method that job requires? Every GC is different, and some are different by project. Running a lot of GCs’ deadlines at once is its own discipline.
• Is every approved change order on the schedule of values? If an approved CO never made it onto the schedule of values, your billed-to-date and theirs will not agree — and theirs is the one that gets certified.
• Is the conditional waiver for this draw out, signed, and received by them? On most commercial jobs the waiver is a condition of payment, not a courtesy. Waiver tracking exists precisely because an unsigned waiver sitting in a drafts folder will stop a check that is otherwise ready to go.
• Is anything else of yours outstanding on that job? A missing certified payroll report, an insurance certificate that expired, an unreturned safety acknowledgment. Any one of them is enough for a cautious accountant to hold a draw and never tell you why.
• Is there an unapproved change order or a back charge in the middle of it? A disputed back charge is usually a deduction rather than a hold — but a GC who intends to deduct sometimes sits on the whole draw while they work out how much.

If you find the cause here, you have your answer, and you have it without spending credibility on an accusation.

Then escalate on purpose, not on volume

If your side is clean, go up the GC’s organization in order. Each step is a different person with a different problem.

The project engineer or project accountant. Ask one specific question: has draw six been certified, and if so for what amount and on what date? Not “where is our money.” Certification status is a fact they can look up in thirty seconds, and the answer tells you which of the four places you are in. Ask by email, so the answer is written down.

The project manager. If it is not certified, this is the person who decides. Bring the line-by-line, not the total.

The GC’s accounting department, once it is certified and unpaid. They are usually not hiding anything. The honest answer is often that the GC has not been paid by the owner yet — which brings you to the part of the subcontract everybody signs and nobody reads.

The project executive, in writing, with the chronology. By now you have dates: submitted, certified, promised, nothing. A dated sequence is a different document from a complaint, and it gets read differently.

One rule through all four: stay factual, stay in writing, and keep asking for the certification rather than the check. A certification is a number somebody at the GC has already approved. Once you have it in writing, the remaining argument is only about timing — and that changes the character of every call after it.

The two clauses that decide how long “normal” is

Read the payment clause in your subcontract before you conclude the GC is stalling, because on commercial work the delay may be exactly what you signed.

Pay-when-paid is usually read by courts as a timing mechanism: the payment is still owed, and if the owner never pays, the GC generally still has to pay within a reasonable time. How a given clause is read still depends on the state and the wording.

Pay-if-paid attempts to make the owner’s payment a condition of the obligation — if the owner never pays, the argument is that the GC never owes. Whether that holds up depends on the state and on how the clause is drafted, and that question belongs with a construction attorney licensed where the project is. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

What your office can act on is this: know which clause you signed before you call, because it tells you whether seventy-five days is a breach or a Tuesday. And remember that it is a buyout question. The leverage to change a payment clause exists exactly once, before you sign.

While you wait, build the record you would need

Most late draws get paid. A few turn into something else, and the difference between a sub who recovers and a sub who settles cheap is almost always the quality of the record — assembled during the job rather than reconstructed after it.

A defensible record looks like: dated daily logs with photos and manpower, so what you installed and when is not a matter of recollection. T&M tags signed on site by the person who directed the work, rather than a list of extras compiled at the end. A chronology of change order submissions and decisions. Draws as submitted and as certified, kept apart. Waivers as issued and as executed.

None of that gets produced in the week you decide to escalate. It gets produced by crews and office staff doing their normal work somewhere the record survives, or it does not get produced at all. A sub who closes out a job properly already has it on the shelf.

Your statutory deadlines run on their own clock rather than the GC’s. Preliminary notices, lien filing windows and prompt-payment provisions vary by state and by whether the project is public or private, and missing one can end a claim that was otherwise good. Find out what yours are, from an attorney, before you need them — then put those dates somewhere your office actually looks.

The pattern is worth more than the payment

One late draw is an incident. Here is the question worth asking after it clears: how many days, on average, does each GC take from your submission to money in your account?

Most subs cannot answer that. Which means they cannot tell a GC who is merely slow from a GC who is in trouble, and they price every GC’s work the same. A GC at thirty-eight days and a GC at ninety-five are two different businesses to work for, and the second one should be costing somebody more at bid time or getting a smaller share of your bonding capacity. That number is also the only honest input to a cash flow forecast.

How SubMark holds the operational parts

Chasing a draw is a human job. What software can do is make the diagnosis instant instead of a morning’s work. SubMark keeps:

• Drawn, certified and received as three separate numbers on every draw, with Draft, Drawn, Certified and Received as explicit states. Which of the four places a draw is stuck in becomes something you look at rather than something you ask about.
• Contract value, billed to date and total paid side by side on the job, so a job quietly funding itself is visible before it is a problem. Retainage is recorded per draw in dollars, including on finished jobs, so retainage does not get confused with a late progress draw.
• A draw calendar carrying per-job billing cutoffs, submission methods and reminders across every GC — the control for cause number one.
• A schedule of values that takes approved change orders automatically, which removes the most common reason your billed-to-date and the GC’s certified number disagree.
• Lien waiver tracking with a status on every waiver you issue — drafted, signed, sent, received — so “is the waiver the reason” is answerable in one look. SubMark tracks the waivers you send up the chain; it does not produce the forms.
• Daily logs with photos, signed T&M tags, and a change order decision log recording who decided and when: the record, captured while the job runs.
• A days-aging report across the change order stages, so a request that has been sitting in the GC’s review for nine weeks surfaces on its own.

The honest limits. SubMark does not submit anything to a GC or to a GC’s portal — Procore, Textura and GCPay are submission methods you record on a job, not integrations. There are no statutory notice or lien deadlines built in. And nothing here chases anybody for you. It holds the facts, so that when you do pick up the phone you are the person in the conversation who knows what happened.

There are dedicated pages for draw tracking and retainage tracking. Office staff are what you pay for; field crews and the subs you invite are free and unlimited — see how pricing works.

The first question is never “how do we make them pay.” It is “where is it stuck.” Four places, and you can usually find out before lunch.