Three Days After the Month Ends
Peru sets a monthly valuation cycle for public works with the deadlines written into it: the contractor presents within the first three days of the following month, the supervisor reports within five, and the entity pays by the last day of that same month. The hard deadline is not the payment one. It is day three.
Most conversations about getting paid on a construction contract are conversations about payment terms. Thirty days, sixty, ninety; whether the clock starts on issue or on receipt; what happens when it is missed. Peru's framework for public works does something different and more demanding, and it is worth understanding even if you never work there, because it makes visible a deadline that exists on every job and is almost never written down.
The short version, first
The rule that decides whether a monthly claim goes in on time is not a rule about invoicing. It is a rule about how quickly the month can be closed — every hour logged, every purchase attributed, every issue from the site store posted, every quantity agreed with the person who has to certify it. Peru writes that down as three days. Everywhere else it is the same three days, unwritten, and a contractor who takes two weeks to know what a month cost is late in both places. The half of this that is a system problem is the closing, not the claim.
The cycle, as the regulation sets it out
Under the regulation of Peru's general public procurement law — the reglamento of Ley N.º 32069, approved by Decreto Supremo N.º 009-2025-EF — article 210 governs the payment of valuations on works contracts under the construction-only and design-and-build delivery systems. Four things in it are worth reading carefully.
| What | The rule | Where the pressure lands |
|---|---|---|
| How often | Valuations are made monthly | The unit of the whole commercial relationship is a calendar month, not a milestone and not a deliverable |
| What it is | A valuation is a payment on account | Each one is provisional by design; nothing is settled until the final account is |
| Presenting it | The contractor presents it to the supervisor and the entity within the first three days of the month following the month valued | This is the deadline that actually binds. It is a deadline on your own bookkeeping |
| Reviewing and paying | The supervisor reviews within five days counted from the day after presentation; the contracting entity evaluates and pays by the last day of the month in which it is presented | Everything downstream is somebody else's clock, and it only starts if you made day three |
Read down the third column and the shape appears. Two of the four rows are obligations on other people and are enforceable against them. One of them is an obligation on you, and it is the first one in the sequence, which means it is the only one whose failure is entirely yours.
A payment deadline you miss is somebody else's breach. A presentation deadline you miss is a month of cash you postponed by thirty days, with nobody to complain to.
What has to be finished before the month is three days old
This is the part that is a systems question rather than a contractual one. To present a valuation on the third, the month has to be closed on the first — and "closed" here means something more specific than the accounting sense.
- Every hour worked in the month is logged against the job it was worked on, by the third at the very latest and preferably as it happened. Time logged in week three of the following month is time that missed the claim it belonged to.
- Every purchase made for the job is attributed to the job. An order raised against a general cost centre because somebody was in a hurry is cost that will surface later, in a month where it did not happen.
- Every issue from the site store is posted. Material sitting on a delivery note in a folder is material the claim cannot see and the cost report cannot either.
- Every expense claim from the site is in. This is usually the slowest of the four, because it depends on people who are not at a desk.
- The quantities are agreed with the person who has to certify them — before presentation rather than during it, because a disagreement discovered on the third is a disagreement that costs a month.
Only the fifth of those is about measurement. The other four are about whether your operational record is current, and they are the four that a system either makes routine or makes into a fortnightly crisis. That is the honest reason a monthly statutory cycle is worth writing about on a product blog: the claim document is a measurement problem, and everything that has to be true before you can write one is an operations problem.
"Payment on account" is doing more work than it looks
The phrase in the first paragraph of the article — that valuations are considered payments on account — is easy to read past and changes the accounting shape of the whole engagement. A payment on account is not payment for a defined piece of delivered scope. It is money advanced against a running measure of physical progress, subject to being re-measured, corrected and settled at the end.
Two consequences follow. The first is that no single month is ever final, so a system that treats each month's claim as a closed transaction is describing something the contract does not agree with. The second is that the cumulative position — what has been valued to date, what has been paid to date, what is held back — is the number that matters, and it is a running total rather than a list of documents. A contractor whose records answer "what did we invoice in June" but not "where does this contract stand today" has the wrong shape of answer.
Where we sit in this, plainly
Our side of the line is the operations half: hours logged against tasks on a job, purchases and expenses attributed to it, stock issued from a site store, and a cost figure assembled from all four so the month can actually be closed. A project turns its unbilled billable time into a draft invoice, one line per rate, with each hour stamped so it is never billed twice. What we do not carry is the measurement package — the bill of quantities, the remeasurement, the payment application and the certificate that answers it. That split is set out in full, with the same honesty, in the two halves of a contractor's system and in the Kenyan construction guide. This post does not restate it; it is about the clock in front of it. One thing worth knowing if a claim is built from a closed month: our accounting period close records the close rather than enforcing it, so a late entry can still land in a month you have already presented.
The version of this problem you have even without a statute
Peru wrote the number down. Most contracts elsewhere do not, and the deadline exists anyway — it is simply enforced by cash flow instead of by regulation. If your monthly claim goes in on the fifteenth because that is when you finally know what the month cost, you are financing your client for two weeks out of every four, every month, for the life of the job. Nobody sends you a letter about it.
Which is why the useful thing to take from a foreign regulation is rarely the rule itself. It is the question the rule implies: how many days after month end can we say what the month contained? That is measurable today, on any job, in any country. Count it once. If the answer is more than three, the regulation is not the constraint.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Cost assembled from four independent streams — logged labour, purchases attributed to the job, expenses booked to it, and stock issued from a store to it — so a month's cost is one figure rather than four conversations.
- Hours logged against tasks on a job, with the rate snapshotted onto the entry so a later rate change never rewrites what an old month cost.
- A draft invoice built from a project's unbilled billable time, grouped one line per rate, with every hour stamped so it is never billed twice.
- Purchases and expenses assignable to a project, so committed and incurred cost sit against the job rather than against a general ledger line somebody has to unpick.
- Site stores as real stock locations, so material issued to a job leaves an inventory record rather than a delivery note in a folder.
More we can add to your workspace
- A bill of quantities with measured rates, so a job carries a schedule of quantities and prices rather than a single budget figure.
- A monthly payment application as its own document, carrying quantity in place this period, cumulative to date, and the deductions that turn one into the other.
- A certification step between claim and invoice, so a supervisor's approval is a recorded event with a date on it rather than an email somebody kept.
- Retention held back on each application and released on its own schedule, reported as money earned and not yet collectable.
- Progress measured as quantity in place rather than as the proportion of tasks marked done.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not tell you whether a particular valuation is properly formed under your contract or under the regulation in force. That is your quantity surveyor's reading and your adviser's, and a vendor willing to give you that answer in a sales meeting is handing you a liability rather than an opinion.
- We will not certify physical progress. Certification is a professional judgement made by somebody who has been to the site and who carries the consequences of being wrong about it.
The first two lines are one build and the third is what makes it worth having: quantities produce an application, and an application that nobody records the certification of is still an email.
What we can build for your market on top of the standard product
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point for your market, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do there. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are in the product because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself. The same door is open here. If the seam to a clearance provider, a supplier invoice that can be read, a limit that is not an amount, a bank or mobile money feed, a statutory return format, a rule specific to how your operation runs, or a link to a system you already have is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will scope it as a build — written spec, timeline and price — before you commit to anything.
Which end of the document you stand at, and what the limit is written in
Three builds cover most of what this region exposes, and the first is a seam rather than a system. Document exchange with the authority runs through a role somebody is accredited for, so what we build is the two-way join to the provider you pick — our document handed over in the shape they expect, and the reference, status and any acknowledgement written straight back onto our record, which is what turns "which of ours are not yet cleared" into a report rather than a reconstruction. Second, reading a supplier's electronic invoice into lines that carry tax, so the purchase side holds a rate and not only an amount. Third, a limit expressed as a multiple of an index unit rather than as a sum of money, with something that actually reads the unit when it is revalued. All three are data-model changes rather than settings, and we would quote them as such.
Local payment rails, and obligations that fall on the buyer
Statement feeds and local payment rails wired into the Payments Register, alongside the buyer-side obligations this region is unusual for — an acknowledgement generated from a receiving event and transmitted, and a report of purchases received but not yet acknowledged. Receiving against the order already runs; the outbound half is the buildable part on top of it.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
Payroll and statutory returns
A local payroll engine with income tax tables and social security contributions computed on live employee records, producing returns in the layout your authority expects rather than rebuilt each month.
Systems you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. No roadmap slide, and no pretending in a demo that something exists when it does not.
Tell us what you need integratedFour questions worth asking your own team before you ask a vendor anything
How many days after month end can we state what the month cost?
What you will hear
A number, usually larger than people expect.
How to read it
This is the whole article in one question. Whatever the contract says, this figure is your real presentation deadline, and it is set by how current your records are rather than by anybody's terms.
Which of the four cost streams is the late one?
What you will hear
Almost always site expenses, sometimes stock issues.
How to read it
Useful because it is specific. A general complaint about month end produces a project; naming the one stream that arrives a fortnight after the others produces a fix somebody can actually do.
Where does the cumulative position live — valued to date, paid to date, held back?
What you will hear
A spreadsheet, and a name.
How to read it
A running contract position kept by one person is the single most common point of failure on a long job, and the risk is not error. It is that the person leaves.
When quantities are disputed, when do we find out?
What you will hear
At presentation.
How to read it
Then the dispute costs a month every time it happens. Agreeing quantities before the claim goes in is a scheduling change, not a software one, and it is usually the cheapest improvement available on a running contract.
See the operations half of a contractor's system
Site stores as real stock locations, procurement with approvals, expenses and purchases attributed to a job, plant under named custody, and a project cost figure assembled from all of it.
Explore project deliveryFrequently asked questions
What does Peru's regulation actually require, in one paragraph?
Under article 210 of the reglamento of Ley N.º 32069 approved by Decreto Supremo N.º 009-2025-EF, valuations on works contracts under the construction-only and design-and-build delivery systems are made monthly and are considered payments on account. The contractor presents the valuation to the supervisor and the contracting entity within the first three days of the month following the month valued; the supervisor reviews within five days counted from the day after presentation; and the contracting entity evaluates and pays by the last day of the month in which it was presented. Legal texts are amended, so read the version in force and take your reading from your own adviser.
Why is the presentation deadline harder than the payment deadline?
Because it is the only one in the sequence that depends entirely on you. If the entity pays late, that is their failure and there are remedies for it. If you present on the eighth instead of the third, nothing has been breached by anybody — you have simply moved a month of cash back by roughly thirty days, and there is nobody to raise it with. It is also the deadline that no system reports on, because missing it produces no document and no alert.
What does "payment on account" change in practice?
It means no month is final. Each valuation is money advanced against a running measure of physical progress, subject to re-measurement and settled at the final account. So the figure that matters is the cumulative contract position — valued to date, paid to date, held back — rather than any individual month's document. Records that answer "what did we invoice in June" and not "where does this contract stand today" have the wrong shape for this kind of contract.
Does AWRA OpsHub produce a payment application or a valuation?
No. The measurement side — bill of quantities, remeasurement, the payment application itself, the certificate that answers it, retention held and released — is a package we do not carry, and contractors should keep the one they have. What we do carry is everything that has to be true before an application can be written: hours logged against the job, purchases and expenses attributed to it, stock issued from a site store, and a cost figure assembled from all four. If you are buying, agree the handover between the two packages at the start rather than in month six.
We do not work in Peru. Is any of this relevant?
The deadline is. Most contracts elsewhere do not write a presentation date into the terms, so it is enforced by cash flow instead of by regulation — a claim that goes in on the fifteenth because that is when you finally know what the month cost is two weeks of free financing given to your client, every month, for the life of the job. The transferable question is how many days after month end you can state what the month contained. Count it once on a live job; the answer is usually the thing worth fixing.
