SEVEN REGIMES IN FORCE, THREE ENACTED AND NOT YET IN FORCE · SEE WHAT EACH ONE REACHES
Put in an invoice date and see every date that follows, with the citation and the day count, including the ones that have already passed. Then every invoice, notice, payment and declaration binds into that job's volume, in the order it happened, while the work is still running.
Casebound, the bound payment record for Canadian construction
Every object the product treats as a record is given the anatomy of a case: a cloth spine, the two ridges of the French joint where the boards hinge, a headband at the head, and binder's board showing wherever the volume is not yet cased in. The motif is named with the very word the name is accused of, used in its only permitted sense, so the correction is doing work on every card in the product rather than sitting in a style guide. The headband is the small woven band at the top of a hardcover spine, the one detail of bookbinding almost everyone has seen and almost nobody can name, which makes it an ideal signature: instantly familiar, entirely unclaimed in software, unmistakably a bindery object and not a legal one. The second review was right that the old headband did not render, so it has been rebuilt on a linen ground at 11.08:1 instead of a two-hue stripe at 1.35:1. The larger correction is to state: state is now geometry first, word second and hue third, and the rule that forbade geometry from changing has been deleted.
One field, one question. Give the invoice date, the jurisdiction and your tier in the chain, and every date the statute produces comes back, closed windows included.
Most people arrive late and already angry, typing something closer to "the general contractor will not pay me" than to anything in the Act. So the first thing on the page is one field and one question. The engine returns every date the statute produces from that one event, including the ones that have already passed, and it names the tier each period belongs to: owner to contractor, or contractor to subcontractor. British Columbia is answered under the Builders Lien Act rather than sent away, because a blank answer is still a wrong answer.
Casebound counts. It does not interpret. Calendar days from an event you can point to, under the rule in force in that jurisdiction on that date.
Alberta has been in force since 29 August 2022 and was amended 1 April 2025. Saskatchewan since 1 March 2022, federal since 9 December 2023, Manitoba since 1 April 2025, the Northwest Territories since 1 September 2025 with prompt payment and no adjudication, and Quebec since 8 September 2025 on public construction contracts, phasing to 8 September 2027. The changelog records what changed and the day we applied it. Manitoba previously carried no number here. The widely repeated 20-day figure is false, and the correction is dated on the page.
An adjudication runs on a short fixed statutory timetable and is decided on the documents. The record has to exist before the notice goes out.
CASEBOUND. A casebound book is sewn and bound into hard covers so no page can be swapped, removed or slipped in later. The record on a job binds the same way, page by page, while the work runs.
Pay-when-paid protects you until the funds land. Then a short turnaround runs at once across every subcontract on the job, and that is the hard part.
For a controller in the middle of the chain this is the mechanic that matters and the hardest one to run by hand: forty subcontracts, one inbound payment, one short turnaround running across all of them at once. Casebound computes them together from the same event, in the jurisdiction's own arithmetic, and reports the result in the numbers a board and a bonding agent already use. Neutrality is not a concession to your subcontractors. It is what keeps the record a record rather than an argument.
QuickBooks Online and Xero have no native holdback, so most Canadian construction books run a hand-built retainage account that somebody rebuilds every month end.
A CPA stakes a reputation on every recommendation, so our owners, our funding and our head count are on the About page, and a named person with a phone number answers technical holdback questions. Every job's record exports at any time with its audit log and a verification script that runs without us. Pricing is published in Canadian dollars, sized to the company rather than to the feature list. Alberta, in force 29 August 2022 and amended 1 April 2025, is computed here rather than footnoted.
The Common Thread. The review was right that a cross-section of a sewn book is literal at one remove, and right that three nested right-opening brackets alias into the standard layers, merge and expand glyph at any realistic favicon size. Both problems have the same fix, so the mark has been redrawn. It is now one thread and three leaves, and the leaves alternate sides. It depicts no book, no cover, no page, no gavel, no shield and no document. It says the three things the product actually claims, and it says them about parties rather than about objects. The leaves sit on both sides of the thread, because the record belongs to the party who issued the invoice and to the party who received it, and neither holds a private version. One continuous thread passes through every station, because removing a page shows. Both outer edges terminate flush, because a trimmed edge is a finished volume and this record is complete on both sides of the invoice before anybody asks for it. Alternation is also what makes the figure unmistakable: nested brackets, layer stacks, signal bars, merge arrows and expand carets all open on one side, and this one does not.
| Say | Never |
|---|---|
| Bound into the case as it happens. The case is the cover. | Build your case. |
| the job's volume | your evidence against them |
| In Ontario an owner has 28 days to pay a proper invoice and a contractor has 7 days after being paid to pay its subcontractors. Both windows have been in force since 1 October 2019. | In Ontario, since 1 January 2026, an owner has 28 days to pay a proper invoice. |
| On 1 January 2026 Ontario made annual holdback release mandatory and repurposed Form 6 as the notice of annual release. | Ontario's new 28-day rule, effective January 2026. |
| An adjudication runs on a short fixed statutory timetable and is decided on the documents. | Adjudication is fast. |
| bound while the work is running | build the file |
| You will know the amount and the date, and so will everyone else on the job. | Get paid faster. |
| one volume per job, complete on the day it is asked for | one-click dispute pack |
Casebound computes every payment date from the governing statute and binds the record as it happens, not after the argument starts.
Every computed date carries its citation, day count and verification date.
Ray, the buyer: I do not need to trust you, I need to check you, then tell another contractor he can check it too.
British Columbia is not proclaimed, so nothing is computed under it.
Manitoba's owner window carries no number until it is verified. Priya: a disclosed gap I can trust beats a number I must check.
Every record exports with its audit log and a verification script.
The script runs without us. Priya: the best sentence on the page. Grant: a custody answer, not a trust-us answer.
| Specialty trade subcontractor (Ray, Surrey) | Am I still in time, answered from one invoice date, closed windows included. |
|---|---|
| Construction bookkeeper (Dana, Mississauga) | Holdback posted where she expects it, a merge queue, and a read-only first month. |
| General contractor's controller (Marc, Ottawa) | One inbound payment sets every payable date on the job, reported as DSO. |
| Construction counsel (Priya, Toronto) | A jurisdictions table with citations, verified dates and a changelog, citable without a pitch. |
| Construction CPA (Grant, Calgary) | ASPE, T5018 and a named person who answers a holdback question. |
The longer argument
In bookbinding the case is the cover, and casing in is the operation that attaches the sewn pages to it. Casebound defines that word on first contact rather than banning it, because a brand that prohibits a word inside its own name has already lost the argument. The price is real and it is not small. All five buyers heard the legal sense first. Ray will not put it in an email footer the general contractor reads. Marc will not defend a litigation word to a CFO. So the spoken channel is carried by a phrase, Am I still in time, and the name sits under it.
Two thirds of discovery is somebody saying the name out loud, so search confirms and advisers acquire. Ray arrives late and angry, typing that the general contractor will not pay him, not a section number, so the first touch is a diagnostic and not a trial. Dana searches weekly and the owner searches once in a crisis, which makes the bookkeeper the cheapest way into the market. Marc will never search for prompt-payment software, so he is reached through the cash cluster and a page in his own numbers. Priya never buys anything. She is measured in citations, and one wrong row costs the channel permanently.
Every valuable search in this category is held by law firms, governments and associations. No vendor outwrites Osler on a definitional query, and that traffic converts badly anyway. So the site leads with utilities: the proper-invoice checker for anyone typing a form number today, the annual holdback release calculator for Ontario's three fourteen-day windows since 1 January 2026, and a holdback journal-entry builder for the searches Dana runs every week. Alberta gets a full cluster, in force since 29 August 2022 and amended 1 April 2025. The jurisdictions table is published as its own permanent page, outside the sales flow, because that is the object a lawyer links.
The engine counts calendar days from an event you can point to, in the project's own time zone, over that jurisdiction's statutory holidays. It is deterministic. No model is involved in computing a date. Nothing in the copy describes a counterparty, because both ends of the chain must sit at the same breakfast table. British Columbia's Act received Royal Assent on 27 November 2025 and is not proclaimed, so nothing is computed under it. Manitoba's owner window carries no number yet. The open debt is Marc: the record still reads to him as the exhibit his own subcontractors file, and that argument is not written.