Reports & practice

Jobs rarely lose their margin in one disaster. They lose it in six quiet places: unbilled extras, free favours, allowances never adjusted, prelims running past the programme, waste, and retention financing. Each has a habit that stops it.

Keeping and handing over the golden thread of information is work. Work has a cost. Price it and put it in the estimate, rather than filing it under compliance and hoping.

The same figures read for a different question. A client asks what it will cost; a funder asks whether the money already lent is still secured.

Monthly is the default and it is usually right. What matters more is that the report says what moved since the last one, and why.

Every dispute page in this series has the same footnote: it depends what you wrote at the start. This is the page about the start. Nine things a quote needs, none of them legalese, and the two clauses builders write for themselves that backfire.

Most of what a surveyor knows about a project is not in the file. A handover that transfers only documents transfers about half of it.

The obvious ones get declined. The damaging ones develop quietly on a project that started out perfectly clean.

On a higher-risk building the Building Safety Act gateways are hard stops. A stop on the programme is a stop on the cash, and the QS has to price that in.

Nine months at eight per cent margin, then two per cent in month ten. Nothing changed on site; the invoices simply caught up.

The deepest point of the cumulative cash curve is the number a contractor has to be able to fund, and it arrives later than most people expect.

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.

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.

Take the valuation schedule, shift every receipt to the date the money actually lands, put the outgoings on the dates they actually leave, and read the lowest point. That number is how much of your own money the job needs, and it is knowable before you sign.

Nowhere. It is in the gap between earning and receiving: retention held, valuations not yet paid, variations not yet billed, materials paid for before the work sold them. Profitable firms fail on exactly this arithmetic, and the fix starts with seeing the four holes.

Generally yes: a building contract does not need a signature, and an email exchange with a scope, a price and a yes can be the whole contract. Which is good news and bad news, because your casual replies bind you exactly as hard as your careful ones.

Losing money starts at the pricing desk, not on site: the forgotten preliminaries, the labour priced at wages instead of cost, the markup that was really the contingency. A pricing structure that separates cost from judgement, so you can see which one was wrong later.

A flat percentage contingency is a guess with a decimal point. How to build a register that produces a number, keep it current, and answer the question every client eventually asks.

QScope keeps the valuation net, then applies VAT at twenty per cent, the domestic reverse charge for construction services and CIS deductions on the payment.

Not at the end, if you do it right. A cost value reconciliation compares what the job has earned with what it has cost, to the same date, once a month. It is one honest table, and the first one you build will probably ruin an evening. Build it anyway.

A cost report answers what the job will cost when it finishes, not what it has cost so far. What belongs in it, how to treat risk and unagreed variations, and why the first bad report matters.

Disputes are decided on records made at the time, by someone who was there, with a date attached. What makes a photo, a diary or an email usable a year later, the reconstructed records that fail, and the ten-minute daily habit that wins arguments you have not had yet.

Taking off is not measuring, it is measuring in a system: one pass per trade, a consistent order through the building, everything written where the next person can check it. The method surveyors use, scaled to a kitchen table.

Not profit. Cash: everything the job has paid you, minus everything you have paid out on it, today. One subtraction most builders never do per job, why the answer is negative more often than anyone admits, and the three numbers that move it.