STCs are an odd kind of receivable. You gave the customer the discount at signing, you paid your crew and your supplier, and now the money sits in a certificate until a regulator registers it and a trader pays for it. Treat it as working capital and manage it like one.
Where the delay comes from
- Lodgement lag. Time between install and a complete claim being submitted.
- Regulator processing. A clean claim moves quickly. A flagged one does not.
- Trader settlement. Some pay in days, others in ten business days or more.
- Rework. A rejected claim restarts the clock.
For realistic timelines, see how long STC payment should take.
Practical ways to tighten the cycle
- Lodge on the day or the next. Do your photo review at the end of the install, not at the end of the week.
- Use a checklist. Standard evidence, standard forms, consistent addresses. Our photo requirements guide is a good template.
- Choose settlement speed deliberately. Calculate what a week of delay costs you across a month of jobs. A slightly better rate is not worth ten extra days of exposure.
- Track every claim. A simple sheet with install date, lodgement date, registered date and paid date shows where your bottleneck is.
- Watch the deeming period. Jobs that slip across 1 January earn fewer STCs. Plan installs and claims accordingly.
The numbers
At the time of writing a typical 6.6 kW job in zone 3 creates 45 STCs, worth around $1,700 to $1,800 at current prices. A crew doing twenty such jobs a month has roughly $35,000 of certificates in flight at any time if settlement takes two weeks. Halve that time and you free a large chunk of cash.
From the desk: the cheapest finance you have is a faster settlement. It costs nothing to ask a trader how fast they pay and whether they lock the rate on lodgement.
What this means for installers
Pick a trader on settlement speed, rate transparency and claim pre-checks, not on the headline rate alone. Energy Merchants settles in 24 hours for established partners and publishes its rate on pricing. See how it works for the process and STC trading for the background.