Final account
How do you close out a job and agree the final figure?
The jobs that end badly do not usually end over workmanship. They end over a final figure that arrives late, unexplained and un-agreeable, because it was assembled from memory in one bad week. The account that closes is the one that was being built all along.
QScope Team·15 May 2026·5 min read
Strip the mystique: a final account answers one question, what did this job end up costing, and why is that different from the contract sum? Its shape follows from that:
The shape: contract sum, then adjustments with paper
- The contract sum, as signed. The anchor everything else explains.
- Variations, each with its instruction, its valuation and its status: agreed, submitted, disputed. This is the section that decides whether the account closes, and it is only as strong as the pricing discipline behind it, all the way down to the ones that started as a conversation on site.
- Prime cost and provisional sum adjustments: allowances out, actual costs in, both directions, the PC mechanics are here.
- Dayworks and claims, with their sheets and notices.
- The money side of time, where it exists: agreed loss and expense, and any damages the client has properly levied.
- Then the reconciliation: paid to date, retention held and its release dates, balance due.
The timetable is in your contract, and it cuts both ways
Most standard forms set periods around closing out: for you to submit the account and documents, and for the other side to assess it. Look yours up in the particulars and hit your own deadline, because a late account weakens every complaint about a slow assessment. And the endgame has a hard stop worth respecting: the final certificate can close claims for good, in both directions, so the account needs to be complete before that machinery runs, not after.
Agreeing it: structure beats argument
Send it with a short cover: the figure, the sections, an offer to walk through it. Then converge section by section, agreeing the easy lines in writing as you go, so the dispute shrinks to the genuinely contested few instead of staying “the whole account”. The mechanics of that convergence, and what to do when it stalls or turns into a discount request, have their own pages: agreeing the final account and the discount conversation.
On a job for someone living in the house
A domestic job closes the same way, and the discipline matters more, not less: a homeowner cannot be handed ninety unexplained lines, and a figure that arrives as a story, contract price, plus the changes you asked for, each with its email, minus your deposit, gets paid. The formal machinery is whatever your contract provides, and if a genuine dispute survives the walkthrough, a residential occupier is outside the Construction Act (section 106), so the route is a letter before action and the county court, where the account you built is the evidence.
What to do this week
1. On the live job, start the account now: a running document with the contract sum and every adjustment to date. Fifteen minutes a month from here beats a lost fortnight at the end.
2. Chase the unpapered lines while people remember: the verbal instruction from March gets confirmed this week or argued about in December.
3. On the finished job, check the timetable first, your submission period and any conclusivity dates, and let those deadlines set your pace.
Where the information stops
What your form’s close-out periods and conclusivity provisions actually require is a reading of your documents, and anything described as full and final is a contract that can release more than you meant: on a serious account, both deserve a professional read before you sign.