The bid and the job are usually two different files
Most contractors win work in one system and run it in another. The bill of quantities that took the tender is a spreadsheet on the estimator’s machine, the signed contract is a scanned PDF, and the cost landing on site is coded to whatever the accountant recognises. Six months in, nobody can say whether the blockwork is inside the rate it was bid at, because it was priced in one place and spent in another.
The module closes that gap by making one thing the unit of account everywhere: the term. “Excavation, m³, 50 per m³” is a term, and it is what the module quotes in, contracts in, measures in, certifies in and costs in.
Where the rate actually comes from
The priced bill of quantities is called an assay on the English screens — a transliteration of مقايسة rather than a translation, so read it as priced bill of quantities and it makes sense immediately. It fills from a reusable term sheet in one action that clones every term and condition line, and heading lines re-total from their children on each save. Lines the client rejected in negotiation are marked as such and are not carried into the contract, so the deletions stay visible on the bid record without polluting what was signed.
Underneath each term sits a term analysis card — one card, one term, exploded
into four families of cost: material, your own labour, subcontracted work and
other expenses. Two mechanics make it more than an estimating worksheet. It
scales from the standard term’s stored recipe, so a recipe written per 100 m³ at
eight excavator hours explodes to 96 hours on a 1,200 m³ line. And every cost row
carries a generated code — M2.101 for the first material row on term 2.1 —
which is the key actual cost is later collected against, so a material issue or a
subcontractor certificate finds its way back to the estimate row it belongs to
rather than to the term as a whole. Push the analysed cost onto the bill, apply
the margin, and the quoted rate is a consequence of the build-up rather than a
number somebody typed. The four grids and the estimate-against-actual columns are
in
term analysis cards.
Rate cards, and which one wins
A contracting price list is a dated rate card scoped by customer or customer class, by currency and by a date window, with lines keyed either on a specific standard term or on a whole term category.
The part to settle before designing one is how overlaps are resolved: by priority alone, lowest number first, with no notion of “more specific”. A list negotiated with one authority loses to the general public-sector card if the general card carries the lower number, even though it names that customer explicitly and the other only names their class. Quantity and dimension thresholds do work — they work within the priority order rather than instead of it. Reserve the low numbers for narrow lists. The full resolution order is in contracting price lists.
Variations, with no version history to lean on
A project contract freezes its prices, quantities and conditions the moment the first certificate is issued against it. From then on the sanctioned route is the contract update — the variation order, and the only genuine document in the owner-side chain, with its own book, number, value date and audit trail.
Naming the contract snapshots every term and condition line, and each change is marked Add, Edit or Delete. Edit overwrites a line’s content without touching its progress figures, so quantities already executed, already certified and already costed survive a renegotiated rate. Add slots a new line in behind a named anchor and derives its code from it.
One behaviour is worth knowing before the first variation rather than after: the conditions grid is all-or-nothing. Put anything in it and it becomes the contract’s complete new set of conditions, so an update adding a penalty clause must re-list the retention and advance-recovery clauses or they are deleted.
Advances that recover themselves
Mobilisation money is a loan against future certificates, and the advance document records the repayment rule as well as the amount: the whole balance on the next certificate, a fixed value each time, a percentage of the advance itself, a percentage of whatever that certificate bills, or nothing until the final one. The middle two encode different agreements — “25% of the advance every time” and “25% of whatever you bill” produce very different cheques in a slow month. Recovery is capped at the balance, and the advance carries two independent remaining figures: what the certificates still have to claw back, and how much of the money the customer has actually handed over.
Quality records, and the gate they are not
Thirteen site forms are covered — inspection and test plans with their register, activity inspection requests carrying the site team’s, the QC team’s and the consultant’s verdicts, pre- and post-concrete inspection, material receipt on delivery, site checklists and pressure tests. The honest statement matters more than the list: none of them gates anything. Approving an inspection does not release quantities for certification and a failed one does not hold up a payment, because the certificate never reads a quality document. Where a real gate is wanted, the platform’s approval cycle sits in front of the quality document’s own commit. That is set out in site quality control.
The base contracting licence covers 67 of the module’s 77 screens; the
contracting-qc sub-module adds ten of the quality ones, while the two general
checklists and the test report need only the base. A licence you have not bought
removes the screen from the menu rather than greying it out.
How certified work turns into revenue, and how subcontractor packages and retention sit around it, is the wider story on the contracting and construction page.
