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Customer Stories
Unita Cuts Admin and Standardises Progress Claims Nationwide
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Replacing spreadsheets with a standardised, scalable, low-admin approach to compliant progress claims.
Zero Retention & Variation Errors: Automated calculations eliminate manual mistakes and ensure every claim aligns with contract requirements and SoPA timeframes.
Faster, Standardised Approvals Across All Projects: Clear workflows, compliance checks and a single source of truth reduce assessment time by 60% and improve collaboration with subcontractors.
National Consistency & Confidence in Governance: A scalable, standardised framework gives leadership real-time visibility and assurance that all projects meet contractual and legislative obligations.
About Our Customer
Established: National design and construction company headquartered in Brisbane, operating across Australia and New Zealand.
Industry Focus: National interior fitout company across retail, hospitality, entertainment precincts and workplace environments.
Clientele: Trusted by major national brands including Rebel Sport, ALH Group, Hoyts, Revo Fitness and Rydges Hotels.
Workforce: Offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and 120 team members delivering projects Australia-wide.
Operations: Committed to delivering fitouts seamlessly, with a focus on collaboration, communication and early engagement to ensure projects start on track, and stay on track.
The Challenge
- Manual and inefficient processes: Error-prone spreadsheets and time-consuming manual processing led to incorrect retention calculations and compliance gaps.
- Poor visibility and communication breakdowns: A lack of a single source of truth for claims, and fragmented communication between delivery, finance and subcontractor teams caused delays and confusion on some projects, potentially putting projects and payment timeframes at risk.
- Compliance and risk management issues: Inconsistently managed documentation created uncertainty and additional review effort to confirm that claims aligned with contractual and SoPA requirements.
As Unita continued to scale nationally, their progress claim process needed to keep pace. All subcontractor claims were being managed through a single spreadsheet that had been adjusted, expanded, and reworked over many years. Different people had added their own formulas and formatting, making it increasingly difficult to maintain — and easy for errors to creep in.
This challenge became more visible when Sian Dyson, Unita’s Business Improvement Manager, reviewed the existing workflow. Having worked across several functional areas during her nine years with the business, she had seen firsthand how much time and effort was being consumed by manual data entry, reconciliation, and chasing missing information.
“It was a muddled mess. We were relying on a spreadsheet that had been manipulated over time: we had to manually add in subcontractor invoices, the formatting and formulas weren’t calculating retention properly, and we had a completely different way of tracking variations, so at the end of the month our figures weren’t matching.”
Sian Dyson, Business Improvement Manager, Unita
The growing administrative burden was not sustainable. Teams had become increasingly vocal about the inefficiencies, duplication of work, and lack of visibility across departments. It became clear that Unita needed a standardised, transparent, and scalable way to manage claims — a system that removed reliance on spreadsheets, reduced compliance risk, and enabled teams across Australia and New Zealand to work from the same information consistently.
The Payapps Advantage
- Compliance & single source of truth: Built-in templates, automated compliance checks and centralised claim data ensured consistency, accuracy and visibility across all teams.
- Efficiency and automation: Automated retention calculations, variation tracking, and RCTI generation streamlined workflows and eliminated reliance on error prone spreadsheets.
- Scalable, low-risk rollout: Payapps could be deployed on individual projects first, allowing Unita to validate the framework before expanding nationally. As the challenges with Unita’s progress claim process became more visible, it became clear the business needed a structured, standardised system that could replace their unreliable spreadsheet and support national growth.
After consistently hearing positive feedback about Payapps from internal team members and industry colleagues, Unita began evaluating the platform and comparing it with their existing project management system. While the project management system provided strong day-to-day operational functionality, it didn’t offer the specialised progress claim workflows, automated compliance checks, or visibility the business needed.
Payapps stood out because it directly addressed the issues teams had been struggling with — inconsistent documentation, manual calculations, unclear processes, and fragmented communication between delivery, finance and subcontractors. Its contract-driven workflows ensured claims could be prepared, submitted and assessed in a consistent and compliant way.
One of the most important advantages for Unita was Payapps’ ability to support a staged, low-risk rollout. Rather than needing to overhaul the entire business at once, the team could deploy Payapps on one or two projects, validate the framework, and refine their process before scaling nationally.
Once those early pilots demonstrated clear alignment, the team presented a national rollout plan outlining how teams would onboard, what the change process would look like, and how in-flight projects would transition smoothly.
Working with the Payapps Customer Success team, they developed a structured change-management program to show how Payapps would remove the administrative burden and improve clarity across the business. This included:
- a single source of truth for all claim data and documentation
- automated reminders for submissions and approvals,
- consistent claim formats for subcontractors,
- accurate and automated retention and variation tracking, and
- built-in compliance requirements at contract or claim level.
For Unita, Payapps provided the foundation they needed — a national, standardised progress claim framework that was accurate, transparent, scalable, and ready to support their expanding project portfolio.
“Our project management platform is an excellent tool for providing the day-to-day functionality that our projects require, but it lacked the specific requirements we needed for subcontractor progress claims.”
Sian Dyson, Business Improvement Manager, Unita
The Results
- Accurate, consistent claims: Eliminated retention and variation errors through automated, contract-driven workflows.
- Compliance & governance confidence: Standardised processes support consistent alignment with SoPA and contract requirements.
- Faster approvals & better collaboration: Clear visibility and automated reminders cut assessment time by 60% and improved subcontractor engagement.
Unita has seen significant improvements in the way progress claims are managed across the business. By moving away from their fragmented spreadsheet and adopting a structured, contract-driven framework, teams now follow a clear and consistent process from contract set-up through to assessment and approval.
Across the national portfolio, 77 projects are now live on Payapps, and claim volumes have doubled to an average of 160 claims per month. Despite this increase, administrative effort has reduced dramatically. When Sian first captured baseline data, assessing a single claim took between 45–60 minutes. With Payapps, that figure has dropped by 60%, now averaging around 20 minutes per claim.
The first three months following rollout delivered measurable improvements:
- 100% elimination of retention calculation errors
- 100% compliance documentation attached to all claim submissions (not tracked prior to Payapps implementation)
- 100% adoption of Payapps across national teams within 90 days
“The single source of truth has really helped to reduce those assessment timeframes. No one has to go through emails or chase subcontractors for missing information. It’s already in their inbox, along with everybody else who needs it as part of the approval process. It just removes all the chasing and back-andforth time-wasting.”
Sian Dyson. Business Improvement Manager, Unita
Payapps has also strengthened relationships with subcontractors. Automated reminders and a standardised claim structure help subcontractors submit correct information on time, reducing delays and keeping both parties aligned to SoPA timeframes.
As Sian notes. “Something as small as an automated reminder to the subcontractor that it’s time to submit a claim means they submit their claim on time, with all the required documentation, and it keeps us accountable to payment deadlines.”
Leadership now benefits from real-time visibility of claim status, outstanding payments, and compliance metrics, giving them confidence that contractual and legislative obligations under SoPA are consistently being met. The program was widely embraced by the business, achieving an 85% satisfaction rate at the end of the project’s 90- day check-in.
Sian credits Payapps Support for playing a major role in the success of the rollout. Having access to the support team via the in-app chat to troubleshoot meant teammembers (and their network of subcontractors) could have a problem resolved within minutes.
“The Support team are next level. I’ve never seen or experienced a support team that’s so prompt, so proactive. Most questions are resolved within a minute, but they’ll give real-time updates if something’s taking more than an hour.”
No longer tied to a manual, fragmented spreadsheetbased process, Unita now operates with a reliable, standardised process that supports national growth and gives teams complete visibility and confidence in the way progress claims are managed.
Transform Your Progress Claims Process with Payapps
Ready to streamline your claims process and ensure compliance with ease? Discover how Payapps can empower your team to save time, enhance accuracy, and improve subcontractor relationships. Book a Demo today to see Payapps in action.
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