FAQs for Records & Tracking

Question 1

What is an interim valuation and who produces it?

Accepted Answer

It is the periodic measure of what the works are worth to date, produced by whoever is applying or certifying, and it is the number the whole payment cycle then runs on. An interim valuation is the assessment, made at set points through a job rather than only at the end, of what the works are worth so far: measured progress against the priced items, materials on and sometimes off site, and variations valued to date. It exists because construction work is paid for as it goes, and it says how much has been earned by this point. Who produces it depends on which side you are on: a subcontractor or contractor values their own works to build a payment application, while the party paying, or its surveyor, values to decide what to certify, and the two are reconciled through the payment machinery. The important thing is that a valuation is a measure, not an invoice: build it against the pricing document line by line, not by taking last period's figure and adding a percentage. Done properly it carries its own workings, so the number can be explained and defended; done from memory it is soft, gets cut, and has to be argued again next period. Because everything downstream, the application, the certificate, the cash the job lives on and the final account, is built on this figure, a measured and recorded valuation is worth far more than the few extra hours it takes.

Question 2

How does a small contractor set up site records without drowning the team?

Accepted Answer

Design the capture around the people who will do it, give every record a named owner and a fixed moment, keep each one short, and check for gaps every month rather than at the end. The mistake almost every small contractor makes is starting with the ideal record system rather than the achievable one: a thirty-field diary, captioned photographs, an allocation sheet that takes half an hour. It looks thorough and dies in a fortnight, because the site cannot spare the effort and a system nobody keeps is worse than none, since it looks like cover and is not. The opposite survives. Build the smallest system that still captures what decides arguments later: a diary short enough to fill in three minutes, a photo routine that leans on the phone's own date and location, allocation sheets the ganger can complete at the end of a shift, and a delivery record that rides on the tickets already arriving. Give each record a named owner and tie it to a fixed moment in that person's day, because a record that depends on someone remembering will eventually not get done. Finally, and this is what turns records from theatre into protection, read the file once a month against what the month should have produced and fill the gaps while they can still be filled. A blank fortnight caught this week can be rebuilt from memory and phones; caught next year, it cannot. Small, owned and checked monthly beats thorough, unowned and reviewed at the end.

Question 3

Which insurances, bonds and warranties need tracking on a live job?

Accepted Answer

Everything the contract requires in both directions: the insurances each party must hold, any performance bond, the collateral warranties owed, and the professional indemnity a designer carries. The honest answer is that you track whatever the contract and its schedules require, because the schedule of cover is specific to the deal and amendments frequently change it, but a live job almost always carries the same families. There are the insurances: the contractor's or subcontractor's public liability and employer's liability, the contract works or all-risks cover, and professional indemnity where any party is designing, each with a required level and renewal date. There is the performance bond, where the contract calls for one, typically in place before work starts and often carrying an expiry. There are the collateral warranties owed to third parties, funders, purchasers, tenants, and sometimes owed to you from those below, often promised at the start and quietly never executed. And there is retention or a retention bond in its place. The discipline is tracking all of it in both directions, cover you must hold and cover owed to you, because the second fails just as silently as the first and leaves you just as exposed. For each item the register should hold the level required, the date it expires or renews, and who owes what to whom, so a renewal is flagged before it lapses, a missing warranty is chased while there is still leverage, and a shortfall is raised the month it opens rather than the day a claim lands in it.

Question 4

When is a commercial letter actually worth sending?

Accepted Answer

Whenever a contractual right depends on writing something down, or a fact will be worth proving later, and always in a flat factual register rather than an argumentative one. A commercial letter earns its place in one of three ways, and it is worth sending whenever any of them applies. First, when a contractual right depends on it: many entitlements, to time, to money, to reserve a position, exist only if you notify in writing within a window, so the letter is not a courtesy but the thing that keeps the right alive. Second, when a fact will be worth proving later: a verbal instruction confirmed the same day, a delaying event recorded when it happened, a condition noted before it was changed, all turn a memory into evidence while it is cheap to create. Third, when silence would read as agreement: an unanswered cut, an unchallenged assertion, a course of dealing that hardens over months, all of which a short factual note quietly interrupts. The register matters as much as the timing. The useful letter is flat and precise: it states what happened, cites the clause, and stops. The temptation, once something has gone wrong, is to argue the whole case in one email, which overstates, concedes points by accident and reads later like the opening shot of a dispute. If a letter would help you months from now when nobody remembers the conversation, send it now, calmly, while writing it is still routine; the letters that do damage are the ones written late and hot rather than early and cool.

Question 5

What are labour and plant allocation sheets for?

Accepted Answer

They record who and what was on site, where, and for how long, each day, which is the evidence behind daywork, disruption, delay and any argument about resourcing. An allocation sheet is a daily record of resource: how many operatives were on site, in which trades or gangs, working on what, and what plant was there and for how long. It sounds like housekeeping, and on a smooth job nobody misses it, but it is one of the most valuable records a site keeps, because so many later arguments turn on resource. Daywork is the obvious one: when work is valued on a time basis, the daywork sheet, ideally signed at the time, is the evidence of the hours and plant, and an unsigned reconstruction weeks later is worth a fraction of one made on the day. Disruption and delay are quieter: when a claim depends on showing labour standing idle, a gang doubled to recover time, or plant sat waiting on someone else's default, the allocation sheets are the contemporaneous proof of what the site actually cost. They also feed the honest running of the job: comparing labour allocated against progress measured tells you whether the work is being done at the rate it was priced, the earliest warning that a job is losing money. What makes them useful is that they are completed at the time, by someone on site, in a form short enough to fill at the end of a shift, and gathered in rather than left on a clipboard. A sheet made on the day is a fact; a sheet reconstructed later is an argument.

Question 6

How should progress be measured from one period to the next?

Accepted Answer

Measure against the priced document line by line, record the measure with its evidence as you take it, and reconcile the cumulative position each period so agreed lines stay agreed. Progress should be measured, not estimated, and the difference is the whole point. Measuring means going line by line against the pricing document, the priced bills, activity schedule or schedule of rates, and assessing what proportion of each item is genuinely complete, from the site's own records rather than a feeling that the job is about sixty per cent there. The number is whatever the lines add up to, which is why it is defensible: an assessor can dispute a round percentage forever but has to engage with a measured line that points at a marked-up drawing. Three disciplines make month-to-month measurement reliable. First, record the measure as you take it, noting what was measured, where, and which record supported it, so the figure carries its workings rather than being a bare total re-justified each period. Second, get each period's figure agreed and keep it agreed: when a line is accepted, note it and on what basis, so next period starts from that fact instead of reopening the debate. Third, reconcile the cumulative position each period against what was last agreed, and where a line moves backwards, say so and explain why, because an account whose consecutive periods cannot both be true invites doubt about all of them. Done this way the running total becomes a proven story that reconciles month on month, which makes the final account a formality; done as a monthly guess, the figure is soft, gets cut, and is argued all over again every period.

Question 7

What happens when a bond or warranty quietly lapses?

Accepted Answer

The protection you were contractually promised simply is not there when you need it, and the loss it should have covered falls on you instead, usually discovered the day it is called on. A lapsed or unexecuted bond or warranty does its damage silently, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Nothing happens on the day a performance bond expires, or a promised warranty is never signed, or a policy is not renewed; the job carries on and no one notices. The loss only appears when the protection is called on, and by then the gap cannot be closed. If a lapsed bond's secured party fails, the security you would have drawn on is gone and you carry the shortfall. If a collateral warranty owed to a purchaser or funder was never executed, the beneficiary has no direct route against the party at fault, which can unwind a sale or a funding position. If a professional indemnity policy has lapsed by the time a design defect surfaces, there may be nothing to claim against at all. In every case the entitlement was real; what is missing is the live document, which cannot usually be created retrospectively once the event it should have covered has happened. The remedy is a question of attention: a register that records every bond, warranty and policy, held and owed, with its dates, and flags each renewal and each unexecuted item while there is still time and leverage to act. The cost of watching is a few minutes a month; not watching costs an uninsured loss and a file that shows nobody was looking. If a bond or warranty has already failed on a live loss, that has moved past prevention into a dispute, which is where the claims side of this practice takes over.

Question 8

How long should project records be kept after completion?

Accepted Answer

Long enough to outlast the period in which a claim can still be brought, which under a deed commonly runs many years past completion, so records are kept for the limitation tail, not until handover. The instinct to clear the file once a job is handed over and the final account is settled is the wrong one, because the period in which something can still come back to you usually runs long after the site has closed. How long depends on the contract and the law that governs it, but the shape is consistent: a claim for breach can generally be brought for a number of years after the breach, and that window is materially longer where the contract was executed as a deed than where it was a simple agreement, which is why the form of execution is worth knowing. On top of that sit the job's own tails: the rectification or defects period, during which defects must be made good and the second half of retention falls due; the durations of any collateral warranties, which can expose you to third-party claims for a long time; and any record-retention obligations the contract itself imposes. Keep the records that would matter if a claim arrived at the far end of that window, in a form that survives, which for records on people's phones and in personal folders means gathering them into one durable place before the team disperses. The records worth keeping prove what was built, how it was valued, what was instructed and what cover was in place: the diary, the photographs, the valuations and their measure, the correspondence, and the schedule of insurances, bonds and warranties. Storage is cheap; a defence you cannot mount because the file was cleared at handover is not.

FAQs for Records, Quantity Surveying

Frequently asked questions

Valuing and measuring the works