Sammenlign udbudslisten med afregningen

Save the contract bill as awarded and the settlement bill as submitted into the project files, dated, with the covering letter that came with each.

Hvorfor: A settlement review is read months later by somebody who was not there, and the first question is always which two documents were compared. Filing them takes a minute now and removes an argument that otherwise has no evidence on either side.

Load each bill so both live in the project side by side, and check that the item codes came across on both. If one side lost its codes in transit, fix that before comparing rather than after.

Hvorfor: The item code is what makes a line the same line on both sides. With codes, a contractor who inserted twelve items and renumbered everything below them still produces a readable comparison. Without them, the match falls back to position number and the report tells you almost nothing.

Open the comparison on the awarded bill and pick the settlement bill as the other side. Every line comes back classified as added, removed, quantity changed, rate changed or unchanged, with the old and new quantity, rate and total, and the difference rebased into the project's currency.

Hvorfor: This is the part of a settlement review that consumes the days and produces none of the judgement. Getting it in one pass leaves your attention for the lines that are actually contentious, and it catches the quiet ones - a rate that moved by a few percent on a very large quantity - that eyes reading a printout do not.

Work down the moved lines with the change order register open beside them, and mark which instruction each movement answers to. The list that is left over - movements with no instruction behind them - is your query list.

Hvorfor: The comparison tells you what moved and the register tells you what was instructed; pairing them is judgement and stays yours. Doing it while the classified list is in front of you is what turns a settlement review into a short, specific set of questions instead of a general objection nobody can answer.

Issue the query list as correspondence, item by item with the amount at stake on each, and record the answer against the query rather than in somebody's inbox.

Hvorfor: A settlement is agreed line by line or it is not agreed at all. Queries raised in writing get answered; queries raised in a meeting get remembered differently by each side, and the difference surfaces at the worst possible moment, when the final figure is being signed.