Handing a job to another surveyor
The file is complete and the successor still spends a fortnight working out what is going on, because the important things were never written anywhere.
QScope Team · 6 July 2026 · 4 min read
Somebody leaves, retires, or moves to another project. The file is handed over: the contract, the bills, the certificates, the correspondence. All present, all in order.
The successor then spends two weeks reconstructing things that the predecessor knew without thinking about them.
What is not in the file
- Which variations are genuinely agreed and which are agreed in principle at a number nobody has confirmed.
- Why a delay claim was awarded four weeks rather than the six claimed.
- What was conceded in a meeting in exchange for something else.
- Which subcontractor is in difficulty and being watched.
- What the client actually cares about, as opposed to what they say in meetings.
- Which figures in the account are soft and expected to move.
A handover note that is worth writing
One page, four headings.
Position. Certified to date, retention held, adjusted contract sum, where the final account stands.
Open items. Every unresolved variation, delay claim and loss and expense head, with a sentence on where each one actually stands rather than its formal status.
Relationships. Who the decision maker is on each side, what has been agreed informally, and where the friction is.
Next three months. What is due, what is coming, what will need a decision.
Why it rarely gets written
Because handovers happen at the worst moment: the predecessor is leaving, already committed elsewhere, and the successor has not started. The hour it takes is nobody’s hour.
It is still the single highest-value hour on the transition, and the alternative is the successor asking the same questions to the contractor, which tells the contractor a great deal about the state of the file.
Recording as you go
The deeper fix is to record reasoning at the time rather than at handover. Why an award was made, what basis a claim rests on, what a figure includes.
That is the same discipline that makes an account defensible in a dispute, and a handover is simply a smaller version of the same test: can somebody who was not there understand what was decided, and why.
QScope keeps the reasoning with the figures: why an extension was awarded, what basis a loss and expense head rests on, what each certificate contained.