Getting paid the full amount on time is an uphill struggle… a battle… a war usually fought towards the end of a contract when both parties teeter on the edge. The work is almost complete but you haven’t been paid for everything and areas of work may be in dispute.
You need the money. The supplier’s patience has run out. The contract has gone on for far too long and what seemed a lucrative project has been reduced to a money-munching pit into which you endlessly pour resources without reward.
It’s depressing. You feel like re-training as a photocopier salesman or just retiring early, even though you can’t afford it.
The chief architect of your gloom is probably the contractor’s quantity surveyor, who appears bereft of feelings towards your predicament.
A quantity surveying director once described his profession to me as being for people with only half a brain. I laughed at the self-deprecation. But I guess one way for a QS who has been immersed in figures all day to deal with an irate subcontractor who hasn’t been paid all he expected to receive is to turn the emotional side of the brain down very low and try to stick to the facts.
If you have quoted your labour rates, recorded all your extra labour on daywork sheets and received CVIs or email confirmation to proceed with the work, then you have more information than they have. Use it.
Quantity surveyors are dealing with multiple sub-contract accounts and are often relying on you to be desperate to settle. They won’t have the amount of information you should have if you have followed my advice in this column.
When you sit down with the quantity surveyor to finalise the account, he or she will have a long list of queries, usually in red (which always makes me think of school books). If you have records to fire back to prove when and why you carried out the work and who authorised it, there is little for them to argue with.
On one occasion we had a particularly hard time with the QS who was keen to prove to his bosses he was top dog in the subbie bashing stakes. He was difficult to contact, unwilling to negotiate and generally argumentative on every point raised. His red list was extensive.
I prepared a full final account, emailed a 20-page document to him with notes, justifications, proof of work carried out and all other evidence. I then turned up at site for a pre-arranged meeting carrying all my contract files, including drawings. I was ready for battle.
The conversation lasted 15 minutes. He could see I was prepared and he backed down, conceding on all points raised. I walked out with a written agreement for exactly what I had asked for. Happy days.