Anonymised, illustrative composite. An Alberta plumbing contractor billing a GC monthly on a multi-family project kept having invoices “held” rather than formally disputed. The invoices were accurate on every dollar figure. They were still missing one required line.
At a glance
The plumbing contractor invoiced the GC monthly, on time, for rough-in and finishing work across a multi-family project. Four consecutive invoices, ranging from $38,000 to $52,000, sat unpaid past their due date without the GC ever issuing a formal notice explaining why. The GC’s accounts payable team simply described them internally as “not yet a proper invoice,” without saying what was wrong with them, and the contractor’s own project manager assumed it was a cash-flow stall rather than anything about the paperwork itself.
The contractor checked every dollar figure, every quantity, every payment term against the contract and found nothing wrong. Contractor’s name and business address: correct. Invoice date: correct. Period the work covered: correct. Description of the work: correct. Amount requested: correct. Payment terms broken down: correct. Name and contact information of the person to be paid: correct. Seven for seven, on the contractor’s own count, and still held. It took a call to the GC’s controller, not the site super, to find out an eighth requirement existed at all.
Alberta’s prompt-payment regime does not treat a “proper invoice” as simply an accurate one. The regulator’s guidance publishes an eight-element checklist an invoice must satisfy before it counts, and the eighth element is not a dollar figure at all: “a statement indicating that the invoice provided is intended to be a proper invoice.” The contractor’s standard invoice template — built years earlier, before this rule existed — had every substantive element right and simply never included that one declaratory sentence.
None of the other seven elements are optional either — the regulator’s list also requires the period during which the work was done, and payment terms broken down rather than stated as a lump figure — but this contractor had already been getting those right for years. The declaration line was the one nobody had ever told it existed, because most invoice templates in general commercial use were never built with a construction-specific statutory checklist in mind.
$38,000 to $52,000 per invoice across four consecutive months, $176,500 held in total, with no formal dispute raised against any single one of them. Seven of eight required elements present on every invoice. One missing sentence, on every one, because the same flawed template produced all four — meaning the fix, once found, would apply to the whole $176,500 at once rather than needing to be argued invoice by invoice.
The bind is that a “proper invoice” is a defined, checklist term, not a synonym for “accurate invoice.” An invoice missing the declaration sentence is, on the regulator’s own list, simply not a proper invoice yet — regardless of how correct every dollar figure on it is. That gave the GC’s accounts payable team a technically defensible basis to keep holding payment without ever raising a substantive dispute, because the invoice that would start the clock had never actually arrived in the form the rule requires.
Once the contractor added the missing sentence to its template and resubmitted the same four invoices — same dollar figures, same work, same dates — they became proper invoices under the same checklist, and the GC’s basis for holding them evaporated in the same instant.
The GC paid all four held invoices in full within its normal terms once they were resubmitted in the compliant format — no negotiation over the amounts, no revised scope, nothing except the added sentence changed between the rejected version and the paid one. The contractor rebuilt its invoice template company-wide so every future invoice includes the declaration line by default, closing the gap before it can recur on another project or with another GC who might have raised the same objection.
For the broader mechanism this is a part of, see what makes an invoice a “proper invoice” under prompt payment, and for how a different Alberta-adjacent payment dispute reached resolution through adjudication instead, see a mechanical contractor adjudicated a disputed claim.
For how AI now helps catch a formatting gap like this before it reaches a GC, see AI-assisted invoice extraction and checking.
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