Why waterproofing work gets executed but not billed

Ask a waterproofing contractor why a job is unbilled and the answer is almost never that the client refused. It is that the measurement never made it off site in a form anyone could bill from.

The measurement is the invoice

For a specialist contractor, the bill is not an estimate. It is a measured quantity against a BOQ item: square feet of treated area, running metres of joint, number of injection points. If the measurement is a photograph on someone’s phone, the bill is an argument waiting to happen.

Three places it stalls

• Measured but not recorded. The work is done and checked, but the sheet is filled in days later from memory, and the quantity is rounded down to be safe.
• Recorded but not approved. The sheet exists, but nobody with authority has signed it, so the office will not raise the bill against it.
• Approved but not cumulative. The RA bill does not reconcile to what was billed previously, so the client’s QS sends it back.

What actually fixes it

Not more chasing. A measurement recorded at the time, against the BOQ item it belongs to, with a dated approval and a running cumulative position. That is a record you can bill from, and a record you can defend six months later when someone queries a line.

This article replaces an earlier post at the same topic on this domain. If you arrived from an old link, this is the updated version.