Set the project up on a JCT or NEC4 contract

Create the contract and pick the clause template it is drawn from: a JCT standard building contract, a JCT design and build, a JCT minor works, or an NEC4 engineering and construction contract under the main option you are working to. The contract records the template and its version, so it keeps naming the right paper after a later version is published.

Why: Half the arguments on a job start with two people applying different contracts to the same fact. Naming the form on the record means the clause somebody cites can be looked up rather than remembered, and a quantity surveyor who joined in month nine can see what the job is working to without ringing round.

Set the retention percentage on the contract and choose the event that releases it, whether that is practical completion, the final account or handover. Add the contract lines so the sum is built out of something rather than typed in as one total.

Why: Retention is the money most often lost by the party that earned it, and it goes missing because nobody ever wrote down when it became payable. A release event on the contract turns it into something the platform can chase; a percentage with no release event is just a deduction with no end date.

Send the contract out for signature, collect it back from both parties and keep the executed version as the one on file. Every valuation, variation and final account after this point hangs off this document.

Why: An unexecuted contract that everybody is nevertheless working to is the normal state of a British project for its first few months, and it is exactly where the terms drift. Getting it signed and filed is what makes the retention percentage and the payment terms enforceable rather than assumed.

Open the payment clock for the project and select the United Kingdom regime. It carries the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 as amended, with the default periods from the Scheme for Construction Contracts, so the due date, the payment notice deadline, the pay less deadline and the final date for payment are computed rather than remembered.

Why: The Act applies to a construction contract whether or not the parties thought about it, and a contract that provides no compliant payment mechanism gets the Scheme's one instead. Setting the regime once means every application on this job is timed against the right statute rather than against whatever the last job happened to use.

Record the dates the contract makes consequential: the date for completion, the notice periods, the retention release dates and the end of the rectification period. Give each one an owner so it lands on a person's list rather than on the project's.

Why: Contract dates are not diary entries, they are the moments a right appears or disappears. A missed pay less deadline changes what is payable and a missed notice under NEC4 can lose an entitlement outright, so these are the dates worth automating and the exact ones nobody remembers when the job is busy.