Construction - Managing Site Preliminaries and Costs

At project award, produce a line-by-line preliminaries budget covering site manager time, welfare, temporary utilities, scaffolding, plant hire, skips, insurance, and permits - tied to the expected programme duration.

Review the contract to confirm which preliminary items are included in the contract sum and which are the employer's responsibility. Resolve any misalignment before site costs are incurred.

Raise POs for all recurring preliminary items - welfare unit hire, scaffold erect and dismantle, skip hire, and site security - creating a paper trail and enabling invoice checking against agreed rates.

At each progress meeting, review actual preliminary spend against the budget. Time-related costs continue to accumulate during programme delays regardless of cause.

Where the programme extends beyond the original completion date due to a client instruction, variation, or qualifying event, issue a formal preliminary cost claim as part of the extension of time process.

Include recovered preliminary costs in each interim payment application, assessed by percentage of work completed or time elapsed as agreed in the contract.

At practical completion, reconcile actual preliminary spend against budgeted and recovered amounts. Capture any outstanding preliminary items not yet invoiced in the final account.

Preliminary costs are not tracked separately from direct labour and materials, so the true cost of running the site is only visible at the end when it is too late to recover shortfalls.

Programme delays add weeks of site costs that contractors absorb without raising a formal preliminary claim, quietly eroding margin on otherwise well-priced jobs.

Interim payment applications include a preliminaries line based on a lump-sum estimate rather than actual spend, making it impossible to argue for full recovery during final account negotiations.