How white card works in outgoing applications

What is white card?

Residential contractors can sometimes work under a contract that requires they only apply for payment of work once it is 100% complete. This is known as 'white card'.

The white card function allows you to track progress and create an application based on a staged payment schedule and is essentially a sectional handover of payments instead of percentage progress payments. This feature is ideal if you do residential projects

For example: If a contractor is working on a roof and completes 50% of the job, he will not receive payment for that 50%, instead he will need to ensure the roof is 100% complete. Once complete, the contractor receives a lump sum.

Chalkstring was originally designed to work on progressive percentage progress-based applications for payment. Therefore, if you could only apply for payment when work was 100% complete, you would wait to update progress until you knew that work was done. However, this meant you would be sacrificing the cost tracking aspects of Chalkstring during the progress phase. As a result, the white card function has been developed for these types of contractors.

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How white card works

White card has been designed and developed as a method by which site progress can be updated accurately, regardless of application formats so that costs are tracked correctly.

How this works in Chalkstring for you is dependant on how you have defined products and components in your projects. You may require the whole product to be complete or you may just want components of products to be complete. This depends on how Chalkstring products in your projects have been used to define work in the first place.

Using white card rules

Instead of changing how progress is tracked, there is now a form to fill at the point of generating the application, where the user can define the elements of revenue progress to include in the payment claim to be produced.

A. 'Generate outgoing application'

Clicking this button will generate your application.

B. Including components or products in your application

Use the drop down menu to select whether to include revenue progress in relation to individual components of products, or whole products.

C. Selecting the progress percentage to include in your application

Use the drop down menu to select the % progress level as a minimum requirement for inclusion within the application. This applies to all packages on an application. The default is to include all component progress in excess of 0%.

For example: If 'Products' and '100% progress' are selected from the drop down menus, only products registering 100% progress will be included.

If 'Components' and '50%' are selected, only components registering 50%+ progress will be included.

The 'Application bill' continues to show details of the live application based on actual progress achieved onsite. This would still be used to review an application as it stands, to make manual adjustments if the application needs to be projected forward or to generate an outgoing application when you need to make a claim.

You can override this when you come to make an application to reflect the terms of your contract. The difference in value between the unaltered 'Application bill summary' and the value following use of some white card rules, will show contractors how much cash flow they are leaving on the table due to this contract format.

For example: If your site progress is equal to £100,000 of work in progress, but the white card rules mean the application is only £25,000, you know you are leaving £75,000 of revenue cash flow in the pockets of your client at this point.

The difference between what the white card application values your work as and the cumulative progress value of the works you have completed i.e. what the 'If Generated Now' calculator shows before you have generated the application, will continue to report on the 'Project Hub' charts and 'Dashboard' figures as revenue Work In Progress as it is work completed and not yet paid for.