Written for the people who value the work

The employer can engage others and recover the cost, but only after giving the contractor the opportunity first. Skipping that caps the recovery.

Not software, not a Gantt chart with two hundred bars: a one-page list of stages with dates and the three dependencies that actually matter. What a written programme wins you in delay arguments, cash forecasting and client management, for an hour of work.

Preliminaries are not a percentage and they do not accrue evenly. Valuing them on the same curve as the works is the quickest way to over or under certify.

Everybody knows which package is late. Very few files contain what would actually be needed to do anything about it.

You can, if the subcontract says so, and half the industry does it on autopilot. The honest questions first: what risk is it actually securing, will you ever administer the releases, and is a right you exercise against subs one you can complain about upwards?

Front-loading moves money forward without changing the contract sum. How it appears in a bill, in an activity schedule and in an application, and what a client-side surveyor can properly do about it.

The due date starts the clock. The final date for payment is when money must arrive. Between them sits a counting rule that keeps weekends in and takes bank holidays out, on the England and Wales calendar.

Every losing job was won first. The eight signals that a tender is not worth your evening, the arithmetic of bidding time as a real cost, and how to decline without burning the relationship, because the job you do not price cannot hurt you.

A variation instructed above does not become a subcontract variation automatically. The two accounts are separate and they routinely diverge.