A variation changes the works, and it has to be instructed, valued and paid without losing the money or the time. These guides cover instructions, valuation rules, dayworks, provisional sums and the line between design development and a real change.
The CDP lets the contractor design a defined part of the works. It is valued by its own rules against the CDP Analysis, and keeping it on separate lines stops designed and measured work blurring in the certificate.
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Most change control fails because it is slower than the site. A procedure that takes ten minutes gets used; one that takes a week gets bypassed.
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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.
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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.
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There are three separate daywork percentages, not one, and they are in your contract particulars rather than in any standard table. What each has to cover, and why the base under them matters more than the number.
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Contract rates bind both ways when the extra work resembles what was priced. When it does not, the rate gets adjusted or replaced, and the safest move is a price agreed before the work is done.
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The answer is not in anyone’s memory. It is in the documents your price was built on: the drawings, the spec and the bill your contract lists. How to check in ten minutes, and how to write the next quote so the argument cannot start.
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A verbal instruction is real work with weak paper. The one-line confirmation email that fixes it, who has to have said it for it to count, and why this works the same on a domestic extension as on a commercial job.
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Not every instruction is a variation and not every variation arrives as an instruction. How to tell the difference, and what to do about verbal instructions on site.
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A live variation register valued against bill rates or compensation events, keeping unagreed change out of the certified sum until it is agreed.
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A provisional sum is an allowance for work nobody could define at tender: the drains until the ground is opened, the rot until the floor comes up. When the work firms up it is valued like a variation, and whether you also get time depends on one word: defined.
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Your contract names who can give an instruction that binds the client. Everyone else on site is giving you a request. How to tell the difference, and the one-line email that converts one into the other.
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Dayworks pay recorded hours, plant and materials plus your contract percentages, and they only work when the sheets are signed as the work happens. When to insist on them, and when measured rates serve you better.
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It depends who carries the design risk under your contract. Where the client’s designer develops the drawings, added scope is a variation. Where you priced an outcome, development is yours. The test, and the habit that settles it.
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