Valeur.Between the figure you measure and the figure that reaches the bank sit four deductions.
A payment certificate is not one number travelling. Work executed starts as a gross figure, materials on site are added, retention comes off, previously certified comes off, advance recovery comes off, withholding comes off. Every step changes the figure, and the order of the steps changes the answer. This page sets out what those four deductions are, which base each one is taken on, and where each stands in the open to be argued with.
The figures on this page were read from the product’s own source; none of them is a customer outcome.
- Gross work + materials on site → gross total
- Retention, previously certified, advance recovery, withholding → net payable
- The certificate writes its own warnings
- Six statuses accepted; two of them are money to the cost ledger
You enter the figure; the arithmetic settles the rest itself.
The order below is the order the arithmetic actually runs in — not the order anyone would guess. The fifth and sixth moments are a pair: read apart, the fifth sounds like a promise of automation; read together they are the honest shape of it.
-
01
Four deductions stand between the gross and the payable.
Permanent works executed give the gross figure. Materials on site are added to it and that is the gross total. Then, in order, retention, the sum of previous certificates, advance recovery and withholding all come off. What survives the fourth deduction is the payable.
Every money step in the calculation is done in Decimal, to two places, rounding half up. That is why the figure on the certificate and the figure in the ledger agree to the cent.
RuleThe order is fixed in the calculation body, not chosen per project.
-
02
Retention and withholding do not sit on the same base.
Retention is taken on the gross total — that is, on the work executed with the materials standing on site included. Withholding is taken on the net figure, after advance recovery has already come off. Two deductions, two different bases.
In practice that means material not yet built into anything is already being retained against, and the withholding is smaller than a reader assuming a single base would expect. Both bases were read from the calculation body itself.
ScopeBoth bases read from the calculation body.
-
03
When the headline and the line detail disagree, the line detail wins.
Send measured lines and the gross work becomes the sum of unit rate times executed quantity — and the headline progress figure is recomputed from those totals. The rate you typed at the top is replaced by the one the lines add up to.
Send no lines and the rate is applied to the contract value instead. The certificate records which of the two routes produced its figure, as a field of its own, so the provenance travels with the number.
ScopeTwo provenances, both named in the source.
-
04
The certificate argues with you before the Engineer does.
The calculation writes four warnings for itself. A negative certificate — meaning an earlier period may have been over-certified. Progress behind plan, a warning that names FIDIC 8.4 and the extension-of-time application. Retention above the FIDIC standard. A payment window longer than the FIDIC standard.
Each one is measured against something. The progress warning needs a planned figure on the project record to be behind in the first place; the other two compare your own commercial terms against the standard ones.
ScopeFour conditions, read from the calculation body.
-
05
Certifying is not filing — it moves the cost ledger.
Six status values are accepted and anything outside them is turned away. Two of the six — certified and paid — are what the cost side counts as real money. A draft is not an actual cost.
When a certificate is marked certified, its cumulative net is posted into a cost category’s actual. The posting is keyed to that certificate, so re-certifying the same one applies only the difference and never counts the amount twice.
ScopeSix values accepted; two of them counted as cost.
-
06
The rule that stops your keyboard does not stop reality.
Type an actual larger than what you committed and the save is turned away, with the offending category named. It is a data-entry guard: you cannot have spent more than you put under contract.
But when the thing crossing that same threshold is a certification, it goes through and is labelled over-committed instead. The first is a typo. The second is a real overrun — and an overrun the ledger turned away would be an overrun nobody could see.
ScopeThe refusal is on the manual save; the certification path raises nothing at all.
Every figure in this section — including the deductions, the bases, the provenances, the warnings and the status values — was read by parsing the product’s own source while this page was written. None of them is a customer outcome.
The budget slips, and the hours go into finding out why.
Two findings from two separate studies. Each carries its own scope inside its own sentence rather than borrowing it from the paragraph next door.
Only 31% of all respondents’ projects came within 10% of budget in the past three years.
KPMG International · Climbing the Curve — Global Construction Project Owner’s Survey · 2015. A self-reported owner survey of executives at more than a hundred organisations; the report is dated 2015.
14.1 hours per week per person were reported in non-optimal activity, 5.5 of them spent looking for project data and resolving conflicts. In the same study, an average of 52% of all rework globally was attributed to poor data and communication.
PlanGrid & FMI · Construction Disconnected, 2018. This is self-reported survey data (599 respondents), and PlanGrid, which commissioned the study, is a construction software company — so the figure was gathered by a party measuring the problem its software claims to solve. It is placed here as the industry’s own statement together with that caveat, not as a measurement of ours.
Valeur makes no claim on either ratio. What Valeur does is put every deduction inside a certificate in writing, with its own base and its own place in the order; and bind the certified figure to a cost category under its own reference, instead of leaving it as a number waiting to be copied somewhere by hand.
Both boxes carry their caveat in their own text, and both matter here. The first is a self-reported owner survey dated 2015. The second was commissioned by a construction-software firm — and this page is selling construction software. Read the figure knowing it was gathered by the party measuring the problem it says it solves; that is how we read it too.
A clause number is half a fact until the edition is written beside it.
The certificate prints the clause each money line rests on. That is a good habit and it is not sufficient on its own: the same subject can sit at two different numbers in two FIDIC editions.
FIDIC’s second edition changed the first edition’s clause numbering; the same subject sits under two different numbers in the two books.
FIDIC · Conditions of Contract — First Edition 1999, Second Edition 2017. This is not a statistic but a fact anyone holding both books can check, which is why no percentage is written here. We have no measurement of how often the wrong number gets cited in the field, and we are not estimating one.
Four clause numbers stand on the face of the certificate; five distinct sub-clauses are named across the whole document. Valeur prints them beside the money lines. Which edition’s numbering governs is written in your contract, and you are the one who makes that comparison — it is not a decision the product can take for you.
Unlike its sibling role pages, this section carries a single authority. The day counts a reader arrives here wanting — the engineer’s certification window, the payment window — are the product’s own defaults printed on its own certificate, not a finding we can attribute to a second publication. A second box would have looked like corroboration and been none. The defaults are in the table below, next to what they are.
Eight rows, every one counted from source.
This is the only place on the page where a rate is printed. Row seven prints four of them at once, because those are the four figures you inherit without typing anything, and seeing one of them alone tells you less than seeing none.
- Payment-certificate statuses accepted
- 6 · the 2 the cost ledger counts as money (certified, paid)
- From gross to net payable
- 4 deductions, in a fixed order
- Money arithmetic
- Decimal, two places, rounding half up
- Warnings the certificate writes unprompted
- 4
- FIDIC sub-clauses named on the certificate
- 4 on its face · 5 distinct numbers across the document
- Cost categories
- 5, each with 4 fields: budget · committed · actual · forecast
- Defaults inherited without typing anything
- Retention 5% · advance 10% · advance recovery between 20% and 90% · payment 56 days
- Distinct operations
- 9 — 5 for the certificate, 4 for cost · 4 write, 5 read · each capped at 60 requests / 60 seconds per organisation
All eight rows were read while this page was written by parsing the product’s own source; the operations and the permission each one asks for were counted one by one by machine rather than read off the file by eye.
Five questions, five honest answers.
Does this do the take-off as well?
Everything on this page concerns what happens after the quantity is settled: valuing it at the unit rate, carrying it into the certificate, and landing it in the cost ledger. Which tool you prepare the measured lines in is yours to choose; the certificate takes the lines you send verbatim, builds its total from them, and recomputes the headline progress rate from that same total.
What happens if I type a progress rate at the top?
If you send measured lines alongside it, the lines win: gross work becomes their sum and the rate is recomputed from that sum. If you send no lines, the rate you typed is applied to the contract value. The certificate carries which route produced it in a field of its own, so the two cases cannot be confused after the fact.
How does a certificate I approve reach the cost ledger?
The cumulative net is posted into a cost category’s actual. Because the posting is keyed to the certificate’s own reference, re-certifying the same one applies only the difference. If you do not name a target category, the one with the largest commitment is chosen. If you have not defined any categories yet, the record simply stands as it is and nothing invents a category on your behalf.
Why does it sometimes accept an actual above the commitment?
Because two different things are happening. A figure you type by hand that exceeds the commitment is turned away — you cannot have spent more than you put under contract, so that is a data-entry error. When a certification crosses the same threshold it goes through and is labelled over-committed, because what is happening there is not an error but a real overrun, and it needs to be visible.
In what order am I supposed to change the statuses?
Six values are accepted: draft, submitted, reviewed, certified, disputed and paid. Anything outside them is turned away. All six can be written at any time; which one follows which is decided by your process. The two the cost side counts as real money are certified and paid.
Let’s open one of your certificates together.
We’ll go through a certificate you already hold, line by line: which deduction sits on which base, where each figure came from, and which line is standing in the place where it will be discussed with the other side.