The documents a final account has to stand on
Nobody assembles an evidence file at the end. What exists at the end is whatever was kept along the way, and that is decided in month three.
QScope Team · 24 February 2026 · 4 min read
A final account is a set of figures. What makes it agreeable is the set of documents underneath it, and those are either created as the job runs or they do not exist.
What each line needs
- Measured work. The priced document, and dimension sheets for anything remeasured.
- Variations. The instruction, the valuation and its basis, and the agreement if one was reached.
- Provisional sums. The instruction expending each one, and the valuation of what was actually done.
- Prime cost sums. The supplier appointed, the actual cost, and the profit and attendance adjustment.
- Dayworks. Signed sheets with names, hours, plant and materials, dated at the time.
- Loss and expense. The notice, the relevant matter, the period and the cost records.
- Fluctuations. The basis, and the indices or invoices supporting it.
The three that are almost always missing
Signed daywork sheets. Submitted unsigned, or signed by someone without authority, or reconstructed from memory two weeks later. Unsigned dayworks are the hardest money on any job to recover.
Contemporaneous cost records for loss and expense. Allocation sheets showing who worked where. Without them a disruption claim has no measured mile and falls back on weaker methods.
The instruction behind a variation. Work done on a verbal, never confirmed, and now priced. It may well have been instructed. Nothing shows it.
The monthly habit that produces the file
Once a month, four checks: every instruction has a variation, every variation has an instruction, every daywork sheet over thirty days old has been signed, and every delay event has a notice.
Twenty minutes. It is the difference between a final account that takes a fortnight to agree and one that takes eight months.
What to do when it is missing anyway
Say so. An account that presents a reconstructed figure as though it were evidenced invites the whole document to be doubted. One that identifies which items are fully supported and which rest on a reasonable inference is a document the other side can work with.
Credibility across the whole account is worth more than an optimistic figure on one line of it.
QScope keeps instructions, variations, dayworks and delay events linked to each other, so the trail behind a figure is already assembled.