Chasing an Unpaid Supply Invoice Before the Lien Deadline Passed

The situation

Thao spent her weekdays teaching a Grade 4 class in Kitchener. Evenings and weekends, she and her husband Anh ran a small supply company out of a rented warehouse near the highway, delivering drywall, insulation and framing hardware to residential builders across the region. Anh had left an office manager role a few years earlier to run the counter full time; Thao kept her teaching job and handled the books after school. It was a modest operation, but a steady one — most of their contractors paid within thirty to sixty days of invoice, as agreed.

In early 2025, a general contractor named Rejean placed a series of large orders for a twelve-unit townhouse project on the edge of the city. Over four months, Thao and Anh's company supplied materials across six separate deliveries, each invoiced on standard terms. The first two invoices were paid close to on time. The third was late. The fourth, fifth and sixth went unpaid entirely. By the time Thao added it up, Rejean's company owed them roughly $210,000 — more than the business kept in reserve, and enough to threaten their ability to pay their own suppliers.

The problem

Anh called Rejean repeatedly. The answers shifted — a slow-paying client above him, a bank delay, a promise for next week that kept moving. Thao and Anh had extended credit terms to Rejean without asking many questions, the way they had with dozens of contractors before him, because a builder who paid the first two invoices on time usually kept paying. What Thao and Anh did not know, and had no easy way to find out, was that Rejean's company was falling behind on payments to several trades on the same project, not just to them. A contractor juggling unpaid subtrades on one job is often already juggling the same problem on others.

What they did know, because Thao asked us directly, was that Ontario's Construction Act gives suppliers and subcontractors two tools that exist specifically for this situation. The first is a construction lien — a legal claim registered against the title of the property where the materials were used, giving the unpaid supplier a right to be paid out of the property's value, ahead of many other claims, if the debt is never resolved voluntarily. The second is adjudication — a fast, interim dispute process built into the Construction Act specifically to keep cash moving on construction projects, where an independent adjudicator issues a binding decision within a matter of weeks, long before a full lawsuit could ever reach trial.

Both tools come with a catch: a lien must be registered within a strict deadline that runs from the last date materials or services were supplied to the project, and once that deadline passes, the right to register is gone permanently — no extension, no exception for a contractor who kept promising to pay. Thao and Anh's last delivery had gone out several weeks earlier. The clock was already most of the way through.

What we did

1. Calculated the lien deadline first, before anything else. We pulled the delivery records for every shipment to confirm the exact date of last supply, since that date — not the invoice date, not the contract date — is what starts the countdown under the Construction Act. There were only a few days left to register.
2. Registered the construction lien against the project property immediately. This secured Thao and Anh's place in the priority line for the value of unpaid materials, ahead of unsecured creditors, and put the property's owner and mortgage lender on formal notice of the claim.
3. Reviewed the invoices for anything genuinely in dispute. Rejean's company had flagged one delivery, worth about $15,000, as short — a claim we could not simply wave away, so we excluded it from the amount we pursued aggressively and left it for later discussion rather than let it stall the rest of the claim.
4. Filed a notice of adjudication for the remaining amount. Rather than start a lawsuit that could take a year or more to resolve, we used the Construction Act's adjudication process to put the payment dispute in front of an independent adjudicator quickly, with a written submission built from the delivery slips, signed acknowledgments of receipt, and the contractor's own payment history.
5. Prepared Thao and Anh for what adjudication could and could not do. We were direct with them that an adjudicator's decision is binding and enforceable, but only as good as the paying party's ability to pay — adjudication forces a fast answer, it does not manufacture money that isn't there.
6. Monitored the contractor's financial signals through the process. When it became clear from public court filings and conversations with other trades that Rejean's company was under pressure from multiple directions, we shifted the goal from collecting everything owed to protecting the lien priority already secured — because that registered claim, not the adjudication decision on its own, was what stood between Thao and Anh and an unsecured line in a failing company's ledger.

The outcome

The adjudicator ruled in Thao and Anh's favour on the undisputed amount, ordering payment of roughly $195,000 within a short window. Rejean's company did not pay it. Within weeks, it became apparent the business was insolvent — unable to pay its debts as they came due, with several trades on the project owed money and no funds left to cover them.

Had Thao and Anh done nothing beyond the adjudication decision, they would have joined a line of unsecured creditors with little realistic chance of ever seeing the money. The registered lien changed that. When the project property was eventually sold to satisfy the various claims against it, the lien gave Thao and Anh's company a secured position ahead of Rejean's other unpaid creditors. From the proceeds, they recovered roughly $130,000 — a real loss of about $80,000 against the $210,000 originally owed, but a fraction of what an unsecured creditor in the same position would have kept.

Thao described it afterward as the most stressful year the business had faced, and she was right to. This was not a case where the legal system delivered a full win — it delivered a contained loss instead of a total one. The $15,000 disputed delivery was resolved separately for a modest partial payment, closing out the matter without further proceedings. Thao and Anh tightened their credit terms with new contractors after that: shorter payment windows, smaller maximum balances before a delivery gets held, and a habit of checking in with other suppliers on shared projects the moment a payment runs late. They also now diarize the last-supply date on every large project the day it happens, rather than waiting until a payment problem forces them to reconstruct it under pressure, which is exactly the kind of detail that can cost a business its lien rights when a deadline is only discovered after it has already passed.

What you can learn from this