Closing the final account without leaving money behind

The final account is the last valuation, the one that reconciles everything done on the job against everything paid. It is not a fresh start, it is the sum of every payment claim, every variation and every adjustment, brought to a settled total.

What the account pulls together

By the time you close, most of the value has already passed through interim payment claims. The final account confirms that the measured work is complete, that every instructed variation is priced and included, and that the provisional and remeasured items have landed on their final quantities.

• Measured work at final quantities. Remeasurement complete, provisional items resolved.
• Variations, all of them. Every instruction from the Engineer to the Contract priced and gathered in.
• Retention. Released to the extent the milestones allow, with the balance scheduled to its release date.

It still runs through the Act

The final account is claimed like any other sum, as a payment claim under the Construction Contracts Act 2002. The Engineer to the Contract assesses it and issues a payment schedule, and the same twenty working day response window applies where the contract does not set its own. If the payer serves no schedule, the claimed final figure becomes due in full, exactly as it would on an interim.

GST on the settled figure

The final account is built net, reconciled net, and then GST at fifteen per cent is applied to the net movement claimed on close. Because the interims were all handled net, the final claim slots straight onto the cumulative position without the tax drifting.

Where accounts stall

Final accounts rarely stall on the measured work. They stall on a handful of disputed variations and on retention. Keep those two fronts clean throughout the job, with instructions tied to every variation and a live retention statement, and the close becomes a confirmation rather than a negotiation. Where a genuine dispute remains, adjudication under the Act is available and does not wait for the rest of the account to settle.

The discipline

Do not treat the final account as a separate exercise from the interims. Build it as the last cumulative claim, serve it under the Act, diary the response, and claim the final retention release on its own date. The account you close cleanly is the account you started closing on month one.