About Ledgerhead

Idris Newell builds Ledgerhead, on his own, in the UK. Email the address at the bottom of this page and I answer it. Find something broken and I fix it.

Why it exists

The law already says a business that pays you late owes you interest and a fixed sum on top of the debt. Subcontractors almost never claim it.

Your contractor holds five per cent of the job back for a year. It never reaches your bank, so you stop thinking about it, and plenty of firms never ask for it again.

The Construction Act gives them five days to serve a payment notice. Miss that and your application stands as the notified sum, though only if you spotted the date going past.

All of it is money you earned and will not see, while you spent the day on site.

How it was built

I emailed accountants and bookkeepers who act for construction firms and asked them straight questions. Who chases an invoice at sixty days. Whether anyone ever charges the statutory interest. Whether a builder would pay to stop doing it himself.

One told me the builder chases his own invoices, because a small firm employs nobody to do it. Another told me the price was too high for the clients he had in mind. I would rather hear that now than in six months, and it is why Ledgerhead tells you who to ring instead of emailing your contractor without asking.

Where it is up to

It is new. It is free while it is in beta, it reads your invoices out of Xero, and I change parts of it most weeks based on what people tell me is wrong.

If something in it is daft, tell me. That is the fastest way to get it changed.