How to customise your payment milestones

When a project is ready for signing, you'll see the 4 standard Beams milestones by default:

1. Break Ground – 20%
2. First Fix – 30%
3. Practical Completion – 20%
4. Sign Off – 30%

If the default milestones don't work for this project, you can edit them before the HIC is sent to the customer. This is typically used if a project is much larger or smaller than usual, or if it's going to be broken down into multiple stages.

What you can change

• Add milestones or remove them (up to 6 for projects under £50k, and up to 10 for projects over £50k).
• Edit the name and description of any milestone.
• Edit the payment percentage for any milestone.

Rules your structure must follow

To ensure customers and builders are treated fairly, we require your custom milestone structure to follow these rules before you can submit it:

• You need exactly 1 Break Ground milestone.
• You need exactly 1 Sign Off milestone, and it must be the last one in the sequence.
• Up to 10 milestones in total for projects over £50k. Up to 6 for projects under £50k.
• The percentage paid out to the builder across all milestones must add up to 100%.
• The final milestone must be at least 10%.
• No single milestone can be more than 40%, except Sign Off.

If your structure breaks one of these rules, you'll see a message telling you what to fix before you can continue.

Timeline check

When you submit your milestone structure, we compare your project timeline to similar projects we've seen before. If yours looks a lot longer or shorter than usual, we'll flag it for you to review before the HIC is sent to the customer for signing. This is a check, not a block — you can still proceed once you've reviewed it.

We do this to help make sure that customers are given realistic timelines for their project, so that we can set expectations from the start.

When to use custom milestones

Use custom milestones when the standard four don't reflect how the work will actually happen, for example a project with an unusual phase structure, or one where a standard milestone would leave you unfunded for too long. They're not the default. Most projects fit the standard four as they are.

What happens next

Once you submit a milestone structure, it's included in the HIC sent to the customer for signing. The customer sees the milestones and percentages you've set, along with the description of what each one covers.