How should we deal with our subcontractors' final accounts?

Treat the stack as one process, not a dozen favours to fit around the next job. Leaving the subcontract accounts until someone has time is how they harden: a subcontractor who hears nothing stops expecting a conversation and starts preparing a dispute, and an unreasoned figure offered months late reads as bad faith even when its arithmetic is sound. The discipline is not complicated. Each account is checked against its own order and rates; each variation tested against what was instructed and what the record shows was done; dayworks and provisional items resolved to actuals; and contra-charges carried only at what was properly notified and evidenced, because a contra produced cold at the final account usually dies, and deserves to. The answer goes back in writing, line by line: agreed, adjusted with reasons, or rejected with reasons. A reasoned assessment lets both sides see that most of the account was never in dispute, and the meetings shrink to the lines that genuinely are. Concede what is owed as firmly as you resist what is not; an assessment that only ever moves down convinces nobody. Close each package with a short final statement signed by people who can bind both sides, and your own account up the chain stops resting on guesses: closing costs become real numbers, provisions come out of your reporting, and the supply chain you want next time leaves paid and spoken to.

Take a main contractor closing a refurbishment job with a dozen packages open. The two biggest accounts had sat unanswered for four months while the site team demobilised, and the groundworks subcontractor had already mentioned adjudication in writing. The stack was triaged first: a schedule of every package showing what was submitted, what had been certified and a first view of each gap, which put most of the exposure in two packages. Each account then got a reasoned assessment against its order, instructions and the site record, the agreed and adjusted lines marked as such, the rejected lines each carrying a reason and a reference. The groundworks meeting that had been heading for a dispute lasted two hours, because most of the account was visibly agreed on paper before anyone sat down, and the argument was three variation lines rather than the whole submission. Eleven packages signed off inside two months, the twelfth a month later, and the contractor's own final account went up the chain on closed numbers rather than provisions.