Written for the people who value the work

A collateral warranty gives someone who is not your client, the funder, the buyer, the tenant, a direct contract to sue you on if your work fails. Why they exist, the three clauses that decide how dangerous yours is, and the etiquette of the ones nobody ever signs.

On a job the Construction Act covers, a deduction from the notified sum needs a pay less notice in time, with the amount and the basis. A snag list is not a notice, and the sum deducted has to be the real cost of putting things right.

The power to omit is a power to reduce the scope, not a power to give the work to somebody else. That distinction is a well-worn route into a damages claim.

A performance bond pays the client if you fail to perform the contract, typically after insolvency or serious default, up to its stated cap. What it costs you to give, why the wording decides everything, and when a small firm should push back on the ask.

Half an hour at Companies House before appointment is worth more than any amount of contract drafting afterwards. Most people do neither.

Rebuilding the same spreadsheet every month, reformatting certificates, and finding out what was agreed. An honest look at the hours that do not appear on any fee proposal.

Preliminaries are the cost of running the site rather than building the thing: supervision, scaffold, welfare, skips, insurance, power. Priced as their own section they are visible and arguable; smeared across the rates they are invisible and unrecoverable.

A prime cost sum is a placeholder price for a thing the client has not chosen yet: the sanitaryware, the kitchen, the facing bricks. When the real choice lands, the contract sum adjusts up or down, and the arguments start when nobody does the adjustment.

A claim is only recoverable upstream if it fits the main contract too, and the two sets of provisions rarely align as neatly as assumed.