When the final account will not close

Genuine disputes get resolved, one way or another, because somebody escalates them. What does not get resolved is the account where nobody is refusing anything and nobody is moving either.

Why it happens

The people who ran the job move to live projects. A closed job with two open items generates no urgency and no diary entry. Each side believes the other owes them a response.

Meanwhile evidence degrades, the people who knew what happened leave, and positions harden simply because they have been held for a long time.

What the contract says

More than most people use. There is a period for the contractor to submit documents, a period for the account to be prepared, and a final certificate that follows. Those are obligations on identified people, not aspirations.

A letter referring to the actual clause and the actual date is a very different document from a chase, and it changes the conversation because it makes the position formal without making it hostile.

Ways to break it

Issue the account anyway. Where the contractor has not submitted, the quantity surveyor can generally proceed on the information available. A prepared and notified account is a position the other side has to respond to. A vacuum is not.

Put it in a payment application. If a payment mechanism still exists, the notice regime brings deadlines with it, and deadlines are what a stalled account lacks.

Meet, with the file. Two surveyors in a room with the documents settle in an afternoon what correspondence cannot settle in a year. It is old-fashioned and it works.

Adjudicate. Twenty-eight days to a decision. For a defined sum on documentary evidence it is proportionate, and the prospect of it often produces a settlement before it starts.

The cost of leaving it

Retention that should have been released is being financed. The final certificate cannot be issued, so nothing is conclusive. Evidence is deteriorating monthly.

And on the contractor’s side, work-in-progress carried on the balance sheet for a job that finished two years ago is a figure the auditors will eventually ask about.

The habit that prevents it

Agree variations as they arise rather than at the end. An account that is ninety per cent settled at practical completion has three open items to argue about. One that is settled at nothing has ninety, and it is the volume that produces the stall.