Standard forms are read widely and particulars are read rarely, which is the wrong way round. The conditions describe a mechanism; the particulars decide what that mechanism actually requires on your project. Working through them is an early step in a contractual entitlement review.
Most of the entries take a line each. Together they determine the payment timetable, the notice periods, the completion obligations and the money held, and an hour spent on them at the start saves considerably more later.
Dates and periods for payment
The interim valuation or assessment date, the period to the due date, the period to the final date for payment, and the periods for each notice.
Those four entries produce the whole payment timetable. Everything that goes wrong in a payment cycle goes wrong because one of them was assumed rather than read.
Build them into a table for every cycle at the start of the project, and the most common category of construction dispute largely disappears.
Completion and damages
The date for completion, any sectional completion dates, and the rate of liquidated damages.
Sectional completion in particular changes the shape of a delay claim, because each section carries its own date and its own damages, and an extension to one may not assist another.
The damages rate matters for the commercial calculation rather than for entitlement, but it determines what a delay claim is actually worth defending against.
Retention
The percentage, whether it reduces at practical completion, and the events that release each part.
These entries are short and frequently amended, and the amendments are sometimes inconsistent with the conditions they modify.
Where retention is the money in question, this is where the answer starts. The narrower exercise is retention recovery assessment, which begins with precisely these entries.
Insurance and bonds
Which party insures what, the levels required, and whether a bond or guarantee is in place and on what terms.
These rarely affect entitlement directly and they affect recovery substantially where the other party fails.
A claim against a party with no assets and no bond is a different commercial proposition from the same claim against a party with security behind it.
Named people and roles
Who holds the contract administrator, employer’s agent or project manager role, and who is authorised to issue instructions.
People change during a project and the particulars do not update themselves. Notices served on a person who left eighteen months ago create arguments that nobody intended.
Checking this at the start, and again whenever somebody moves, costs minutes.
Notice provisions and methods
Where notices have to be sent, to whom, and by what means. Some contracts specify a method and exclude others, and email has made this more rather than less important.
Also the periods: which are measured in calendar days, which in business days, and how a deadline falling at a weekend is treated.
Those details decide whether an otherwise sound notice was effective, and they are entirely knowable in advance.
The amendments that touch them
Amendment schedules frequently change particulars without changing the clauses that use them, which is why reading the conditions alone produces a misleading picture.
Read the particulars as amended, not as printed, and rebuild the mechanism from what results.
Where the two are inconsistent, that inconsistency is worth identifying at the start rather than discovering it in a contested cycle.
Programme and possession
The date for possession of the site, any deferment permitted, and whether possession is given in sections. Each of those affects when the contractor’s obligations start and what a delay claim runs from.
Where possession was given late or in parts, and the particulars say otherwise, that is frequently an entitlement in itself rather than a practical inconvenience.
It is also the kind of thing nobody records at the time, because everybody is relieved to have started at all.
Fluctuations and what is fixed
Whether the contract sum is fixed or subject to adjustment for cost movement, and if so on what basis.
On longer projects this entry can be worth a great deal, and on shorter ones it is frequently left at the default without anybody considering it.
Where a project has run considerably longer than planned, it is worth checking what the particulars actually provide before assuming the price is simply fixed.
Third parties and the chain
Whether collateral warranties are required, from whom, and in what form. Also whether subcontractors are named or required to be approved.
Named subcontractor provisions in particular can affect entitlement where the named party fails, and the position differs considerably between forms.
These entries are easy to overlook because they rarely matter until something goes wrong, at which point they matter a great deal.
What to do with inconsistent entries
Particulars are completed under time pressure and they contain errors: blanks left unfilled, periods that contradict the conditions, dates that do not align with the programme.
Finding one at the start of a project allows it to be raised and resolved. Finding it during a dispute turns it into a point of argument with real money attached.
Where an entry has been left blank, the contract usually provides a default, and the default is rarely what either party assumed.
Turning it into something usable
One page, built at the start of the project, carrying the payment timetable, the notice periods and their consequences, the completion dates and the retention position.
Circulated to the people who need it, not filed with the contract. The commercial manager is rarely the person who needs to serve a notice at short notice.
That page is the cheapest piece of risk management on any construction project, and producing it belongs with commercial management at the outset rather than with claims work afterwards.
Not sure whether the contract gives you a route?
A contractual entitlement review tests whether the contract gives a right to additional payment or time for what happened, before anybody argues about what it is worth.