Finance and Bookkeeping
Collections Lien Notices for roofing firms
Some dates in this work were set by a legislature rather than by you or your customer. They run whether or not anyone is looking, and passing one removes an option for good.
The calendar and what sits behind it
A running list of the dates attached to your open jobs, each derived from something recorded on the job rather than from anybody’s memory of when work finished, with enough warning ahead of each that a decision is still a decision.
Behind the calendar, the underlying material assembled while the job file is still open — the parties, the dates, the contract documents and the record of what was performed — so that if you and your adviser choose to act, the preparation is already done rather than beginning then.
And a documented escalation trail: what was sent, when, to whom, and what prompted it. Not a narrative, a record.
A date that passes does not come back
Nearly everything else a back office does is recoverable. A late reconciliation gets caught up. A slow invoice can be chased next week. The work on this desk is different in kind, because the deadlines are not internal targets — they are conditions attached to a right, set outside the relationship entirely, and they do not negotiate.
The one-sidedness is what makes the failure so quiet. Nothing happens on the day a window closes. No system flags it, the customer does not mention it, and the account carries on looking exactly as it did the week before. The consequence only becomes visible much later, at the moment somebody finally decides the account is worth pursuing and discovers that the decision was actually made months earlier by default.
Roofing is unusually exposed to this. The trade sits below general contractors and property owners on a great many jobs, the work is often completed long before payment becomes contentious, and completion itself — the event several clocks run from — is frequently ambiguous. A crew leaves, a punch item lingers, an invoice goes out in stages. Establishing which day counted is far easier while the job is fresh than reconstructing it in a dispute.
So the discipline is unromantic: capture the facts a date is derived from at the moment they occur, and keep the calendar somewhere other than in one person’s head.
What a statutory window looks like
These deadlines are concrete rather than general, and one state’s drafting shows the shape clearly. California Civil Code section 8412 — Time to record a claim of lien provides that “A direct contractor may not enforce a lien unless the contractor records a claim of lien after the contractor completes the direct contract, and before the earlier of the following times: (a) Ninety days after completion of the work of improvement. (b) Sixty days after the owner records a notice of completion or cessation.”
Read it as a worked example of a class and not as a rule that applies to you. Three features generalise: the window opens on an event rather than on an invoice, it can close on the earlier of two different triggers, and one of those triggers is an act by somebody else entirely. A contractor who is not watching for the owner’s filing can lose time they never knew they were spending.
Other states set different periods, count from different events, and impose different preliminary requirements — some of which fall due near the start of a job rather than the end. Which of them reaches your work is a legal question, and it belongs with your counsel. This desk holds the calendar those answers produce; it does not produce the answers.
This describes one state’s statute to illustrate a pattern. It is not legal advice, it makes no determination about your jobs, your rights or any deadline that may apply to you, and the rules differ materially by state. Those questions belong with your own counsel; the department page below sets out where this work stops.
The desk this follows on from
This work sits at the far end of Finance and Bookkeeping, which carries the boundary for the department as a whole.
Questions about deadlines and escalation
Do you decide whether we pursue an account?
No. We track what dates exist, prepare what needs preparing, and tell you what is approaching — the decision to act, and the choice of remedy, stays with you and where appropriate with your counsel. The purpose of this desk is that the decision is still available when you come to make it.
When does the tracking start?
At the job, not at the dispute. Every date that matters here is derived from something that happened on the job — when work started, when it finished, who the parties were — and those facts are easy to record while the file is open and awkward to establish once it is closed and the crew has moved on three times.
Are you a collections agency?
No. This desk keeps a calendar, assembles documents and records what has been done, which is administrative work inside your own business. It is not third-party collection, and where an account moves beyond documentation the next step is a decision for you and your adviser rather than a service offered here.
We work in several states. How does that work?
The rules differ materially between them, including which dates exist at all, and that is the point of tracking rather than remembering. What we hold is your calendar of the dates that apply to your jobs as established with your counsel; what we do not do is tell you what any state requires. The distinction matters because getting it wrong is not recoverable.
Most of our customers pay. Is this worth the effort?
The effort is mostly front-loaded and mostly clerical, which changes the arithmetic. Recording a handful of dates as a job opens costs very little across a season. The alternative is that the small number of accounts which do go wrong go wrong without any options left, and those are precisely the accounts where options were worth having.
What if a date has already passed?
It has, and we will say so plainly rather than imply something can be reconstructed. That is uncomfortable and it is more useful than the alternative — an account being worked for months on the assumption that a remedy remains available. Knowing which accounts are outside their window changes how you spend attention on the rest.
The example statute
- California Civil Code section 8412 — Time to record a claim of lien — California Legislative Counsel
Ask where your dates are written down
If the answer is that somebody keeps an eye on it, the calendar does not exist yet — and that is the whole of what this desk builds.