Start the works with the acta de comprobacion del replanteo

Work the mobilisation checklist before the date is set: land handed over, permits issued, services diverted or at least located, access agreed, welfare in place. Anything still open is a reserva you take to the act with you rather than a surprise you find on the ground.

Why: A reserva raised in the acta suspends the start for exactly that part and costs nothing. The same fact discovered three weeks later is an extension of time you have to prove, against a clock that has already been running. The list is short and the asymmetry between the two outcomes is not.

Send the acta for signature by the direccion facultativa and by the contractor, with the reservas written into it rather than agreed verbally on the day. The signature record keeps who signed, when, and what document they signed.

Why: This is the single most consequential date on the contract and it is routinely captured as a scanned page in somebody's mail. A signed record with a trail is what answers, without ceremony, the question of whether a delay claim two years from now is counting from the right day.

Put the signed acta into the project files under the contract documents, not in the site folder, and make sure its date is the date on the document rather than the day somebody uploaded it.

Why: Every subsequent argument about time, from a penalty to a revision de precios eligibility date, is measured from this one page. It is worth ten seconds of filing so that the person who needs it in eighteen months is not the only one who knows where it went.

Enter the completion date and the intermediate plazos parciales, counted from the acta, and put a name against each. Include the contractual date by which the programa de trabajo itself is due, because that one is measured from the same act.

Why: Dates that exist only in the contract are dates nobody is watching. The plazos parciales are the ones that carry penalties of their own and the ones a monthly meeting forgets first, precisely because the final date still looks reachable.

Build the programme starting on the day after the acta, with the activities and the monthly quantities the contract asks you to show, and baseline it once the direccion facultativa has approved it.

Why: An approved programa is what an extension of time is later measured against, so it is worth being honest in rather than optimistic. A programme that started on the wrong day is worse than none at all: every comparison drawn from it is shifted, and the shift is invisible in the numbers.