Price the preliminaries and general conditions

Build the list of everything it takes to run the site: management and supervision, welfare and cabins, temporary services, common plant, scaffolding, security, insurances and bonds.

Why: The items you forget in prelims are the ones you fund out of profit. A complete checklist read against the contract is the difference between a covered site and a leaking one.

Mark each item as time-related or fixed, then price the time-related ones per week against the programme duration and the fixed ones as one-off set-up and removal.

Why: Splitting them this way is what lets prelims flex if the programme moves. If the job runs four weeks late, you can show exactly what the extra time costs instead of guessing.

Look at the staff, plant and cabins the prelims imply in the resource summary and sanity check the headcount curve against the programme peaks.

Why: A prelims price that needs three site managers in a quiet month is a warning. Seeing the resource curve catches a double count or a gap before it reaches the tender total.

Bring the prelims total into the bill as its own section, kept separate from measured work, and read it back as a percentage of the works value.

Why: Keeping prelims visible as their own line lets a reviewer benchmark them at a glance. Burying them in the rates hides the one number a client always wants to test.