GLOSSARY
Every term tectm uses, defined as if you've never run a project before.
An accrual is cost that has been incurred on site but not yet invoiced — work that has happened, payment that has not.
Accruals matter because a project's real cost-to-date is always higher than the invoiced cost. Without an accrual position the monthly cost report understates spend and overstates margin.
Example: A subbie has worked 80 hours this month but has not yet submitted a claim. Those 80 hours sit as an accrual against the project until the claim is received and certified.
A back charge is a deduction the head contractor takes from a subcontractor's payment claim to recover the cost of fixing the subbie's breach.
Back charges are gated by the contract: most head contracts require notice in writing within a set window, otherwise the right to back-charge is waived. Missing the gate is how head contractors lose recoverable cost.
Example: A subbie leaves the site uncleared. The head contractor hires a cleaner for $1,400 and back-charges that amount against the subbie's next progress claim.
A Bill of Quantities is an itemised list of every measurable work item in a project, with the quantity, unit, rate and total — typically prepared by a quantity surveyor at tender.
BoQ contracts price work item by item, so claims are made by re-measuring the actual quantity completed against the BoQ line. This is different from a Lump Sum contract, where the price is fixed and progress is claimed as a percentage.
A cost code is the budget-side identifier every docket, purchase order and supplier invoice gets tagged with so the cost rolls up against the right budget line.
Cost codes are the glue between the dockets coming in from the site and the budget rolling up on the cost report. A docket without a cost code is unbookable; a budget line without dockets feeding it does not move.
A docket is a daily record of the labour, plant and materials that went into a piece of work on site, captured by the people who did the work.
Dockets are the evidence layer underneath every payment claim, every variation, every cost report. If the docket is wrong, every downstream number is wrong.
Example: A carpentry crew of three works 9 hours on framing, with one tower scaffold on site for the day. The leading hand submits a docket that night listing the three labour entries, the scaffold, and the cost code "1-200 Framing".
A head contractor is the party that holds the principal contract with the project's client and is responsible for delivering the whole project, subcontracting individual trades as needed.
tectm is built around the head contractor's view: revenue earned above (head contract), cost incurred below (subcontracts), margin in the middle. A head contractor on one project can simultaneously be a subcontractor on another and use the same platform for both.
A payment certificate is the head contractor's formal written response to a subbie's payment claim, stating the amount the head contractor agrees to pay and the reasons for any disputed amount.
Under the Security of Payment Act, payment certificates have a strict statutory window. Issue late or fail to issue and the claim is taken to be approved in full — even amounts the head contractor disputes.
A payment claim is a subcontractor's formal request for payment for work completed up to a reference date, made under the Security of Payment Act.
Payment claims trigger statutory response windows for the head contractor. The claim must be substantiated — without dockets, invoices or variation approvals behind it, the claim is fragile in adjudication.
Retention is a percentage of each payment claim that the head contractor holds back as security for defect rectification and contractual performance, typically released at practical completion and end of defects-liability period.
Retention is governed by the contract — usually 5% up to a cap of 5% of the total contract value, with half released at practical completion and half at the end of the defects period. Mis-tracking retention is a common source of disputes at project close.
Row-Level Security is the database-layer access control tectm uses to ensure that cost data, internal rate cards and head-contractor-only fields are never visible to subcontractors or clients above, even if they share the same database.
RLS runs at the Postgres layer, not the application layer — so a misconfigured frontend cannot leak data the database has already refused to return. Every API request resolves the user's role and Postgres returns only the rows that role is authorised to see.
The Security of Payment Act is state-level legislation in every Australian jurisdiction that sets the timeframes and process for payment claims, payment certificates, and rapid adjudication if payment is disputed.
Each state's Act differs in the detail but the structure is the same — claim within a window, certify within a window, adjudicate quickly if disputed. Missing the windows is how recoverable claims become irrecoverable.
A Schedule of Rates is the agreed unit price list for every common work type in a contract — labour classifications, plant items, materials — used to price ad-hoc or measured work without re-tendering.
SoR contracts price work after the fact by multiplying measured quantity by agreed rate. They suit projects where the scope is uncertain but the work types are predictable, like maintenance, civil, and demolition packages.
A substantiation packet is the bundle of evidence — dockets, payment certificates, signed variations, supplier invoices, photos — that proves every line on a payment claim is real and contractually owed.
A claim without a substantiation packet is fragile in adjudication. tectm generates the packet on demand from the records already in the system, so substantiation takes minutes instead of days.
Tectus is tectm's AI contracts expert — it reads the head contract on ingest, extracts the rates, retention, milestones and risk clauses, and answers natural-language questions with exact clause and page citations.
Tectus is available on every screen in tectm. Subcontractors using the platform see the same Tectus, restricted by RLS to the contracts they have a right to read.
A variation is any change to the scope, time or price of the contract — additional work, an omission, a time extension, a rate change, or a provisional-sum adjustment — that needs to be agreed and documented to keep the contract intact.
Variations are where margin slips silently. A verbal yes on site without paperwork is a variation the head contractor cannot claim; a missed time extension is a missed defence against liquidated damages.
