Release a provisional sum and charge the attendance fee

Enter each sum the bill carries: the provisional sums the owner holds for undefined scope, the prime cost sums standing in for packages to be tendered, and the contingency. Give each one the scope it covers, not just a figure.

Why: A sum with no stated scope gets drawn against for whatever is convenient, and by the time somebody asks what it was for the answer is a list of unrelated instructions. Writing the scope down at the start is what makes the drawdowns arguable later.

Carry the packages and the sums in the bill as positions under a section of their own, then add the coordination fee as a markup scoped to that section rather than to the bill. A scoped markup applies to the position it names and everything under it, and can stand in for a bill-wide one where the two would otherwise both apply.

Why: The main contractor's fee for coordinating specialists the owner appoints directly, and for handling what the owner supplies, is a percentage on a defined part of the works and not on the job. If those packages live only in a register, the fee has no base and ends up as a number somebody agreed verbally. Build the section first and the fee is configuration; charge the fee first and it has nothing to compute on.

Once the scope firms up, tender the package properly and let it. The price it is let at is what actually gets drawn against the sum, not the sum itself.

Why: A provisional sum is an estimate of something nobody had designed, and the gap between the sum and the let price is money that belongs to somebody. Tendering it rather than converting it at book value is how that gap becomes visible while there is still a decision to make about it.

Record a drawdown for the amount released and note which package it went to. The remaining balance is worked out from the drawdowns rather than stored, and drawing more than was held is recorded and flagged rather than refused.

Why: A stored balance goes stale the first time somebody edits a drawdown; a derived one cannot. And the moment a sum goes over is exactly the moment the project needs to see it rather than be stopped by it, because the work is usually already instructed by then and the conversation that matters is with the owner, not with the software.

Report what is held, what has been drawn, what remains against each sum, and the coordination fee the packages have earned. Take the unspent balances to the owner as part of the settlement conversation.

Why: An unspent provisional sum belongs back to the owner at final account, and it goes back because somebody put it on a schedule and asked. Reporting the balances monthly means that schedule already exists when the settlement starts, instead of being assembled from instructions at the point where every figure is contested.