01
Final account preparation
The account assembled from the contract sum, agreed variations, remeasurement and adjustment of provisional sums, with the substantiation attached to each line rather than promised.
Service 06
Final accounts and disputes
Close the job without paying for someone else's mistake
Final accounts settle on evidence, never on goodwill. We assemble the account, test the contractor position line by line and support you through negotiation, mediation or adjudication if it reaches that point.
What you get
Deliverables.
01
Final account preparation and agreement
02
Loss and expense and extension of time
03
Expert and adjudication support
The problem
Most accounts are not settled on merit. They are settled on fatigue.
Two years after practical completion, with the site team dispersed and the money already spent elsewhere, the party willing to keep arguing usually wins.
The account arrives as a large number with a thin substantiation. Some of it is legitimate work properly instructed. Equally, some of it was always inside the contract scope. Some of it is a delay claim reworked as a valuation. Separating those three requires going back through instructions, records and measure, and that is exactly the work people avoid, which is why inflated accounts get partially paid.
The other failure is the mirror image: a defensible entitlement abandoned because nobody could face substantiating it. Both outcomes come from the same cause, which is not knowing what the position is actually worth.
What we do
Establish the position, then argue it.
02
Account review
Independent assessment of an account submitted to you. Entitlement tested first, then value, then substantiation, with a clear schedule of what is agreed, what is disputed and what is simply unsupported.
03
Remeasurement
Contested work measured again from the drawings and records, against the original basis of measurement, so the argument moves from assertion to quantity.
04
Head of claim assessment
Each head assessed on entitlement, evidence and value, and rated for strength. You get a view of the realistic settlement range before deciding how hard to push.
05
Negotiation support
Preparation of the commercial position, attendance at settlement meetings, and the schedules that make a proposal credible on the day rather than three weeks later.
06
Quantum support
Commercial and quantum analysis for adjudication, mediation and formal proceedings, working to your legal team. We are not solicitors and we do not present ourselves as any form of legal adviser.
We will tell you when your position is weak. That is the point of instructing someone with no stake in the outcome.
How we report on contentious matters
A contested account is expensive in fees, in management time and in the relationships it burns. The decision to run it should be made on a realistic assessment, not on an adviser's optimism about a case they are being paid to pursue.
So our head of claim assessments are rated honestly, including the ones that go against you. Where the evidence does not support a claim we say so early, while settling is still cheap. In cases where it does support one, the schedule behind it is built to be tested by the other side and to survive it.
Questions
Final accounts, answered directly.
Do you act for contractors or only for clients?
The work is commercial, so both directions occur, but never on the same project and never on both sides of the same account. The capacity in which we act is declared at appointment and printed on every document we issue, so nobody is ever unclear about who we are working for.
Our records are poor. Is the position hopeless?
Not necessarily, but it changes the strategy. Where contemporaneous records are thin the position has to be built from what does exist: instructions, minutes, programmes, correspondence, photographs and the measure itself. What we will not do is present a claim that the evidence cannot carry, because it collapses under the first serious challenge and damages the parts that were sound.
Do you do expert witness work?
We provide quantum and commercial analysis to legal teams and prepare the schedules that support a case. Whether a formal expert appointment is appropriate depends on the matter and on your solicitor's strategy, and we will discuss it openly rather than accepting a role that does not fit.
Is it too late to bring you in?
Rarely, though the earlier the better. The most useful point is when the account has just been submitted and before positions have been stated in correspondence that later has to be defended. If proceedings have already started we work to your legal team's timetable and scope. Better still, an appointment under cost control during delivery usually prevents the situation entirely.
Related
What sits either side of this.
Cost control and variations
The discipline that stops an account becoming contentious in the first place.
Quantities and take-off
Remeasurement, and the audit trail that makes a position provable.
Tendering and procurement
Where the contract terms that govern the argument were originally set.
Insights