Tenders, valuations and retentions.

Most contractors we meet are good at building. Fewer are as good at the paperwork that surrounds a build, and that paperwork decides whether a good job is also a profitable one.

Three pieces of it come up in almost every conversation: the tender, the valuation and the retention.

The tender pack nobody has time to read

A tender arrives as hundreds of pages of drawings, specifications and schedules. Someone senior has to read enough of it to decide whether to bid, then read all of it to price it. In a small firm, that someone is usually the person who also runs the live jobs.

A tender agent can do the first read. It pulls out the scope, the key dates, the unusual clauses and the questions to ask the client, and puts them in a two-page summary. Then it compares the job with similar past projects to give the estimator a starting point.

The estimator still owns every price. But they start from what similar jobs actually cost, not from memory, which is exactly the shift a fit-out manufacturer we audited put on its own list: estimation built on historical project data.

Office to site, and back

One commercial fit-out firm we spoke to named its biggest problem plainly: getting information between the office and the site. Drawings, safety documents and tender details reached site on an ad hoc basis, through one person who carried the whole link. Coming back the other way, site reports, timesheets and variations were written up at the end of the day, if at all.

The fix is not another app for site teams. They will not use it, and that same firm had already tried and abandoned one tool. It is meeting site teams where they are. A site capture agent can turn a voice note and a few photos into a daily report, a timesheet entry or a variation record, and file it in the right place. The project manager approves each one. The office sees the site in the same hour, not next week.

Valuations and retentions: the cash you have already earned

Then comes the money. Every month, a payment application has to be prepared, backed up and submitted, with variations that were agreed on site and need to be priced and evidenced. Retentions are held back on every job and released months or years later, but only if someone remembers to claim them on the right date.

In many firms this lives in a spreadsheet kept by one person. When that person is busy, cash is left on the table.

A valuations agent keeps the list. It tracks every application, variation and retention release date across live and finished jobs. It drafts the application from the records that already exist, and chases what is due. Your quantity surveyor signs off every valuation before it goes. Nothing about the commercial judgement changes. What changes is that nothing is forgotten.

The comparison nobody makes

The question we hear most from owners is simple: “What did we think this job would cost, and what did it actually cost?” Few firms can answer it quickly, because the estimate lives in one system, the timesheets in another and the invoices in a third.

Once those are connected, the comparison makes itself, and every finished job makes the next estimate better. That is why we usually start with the connections, before any agent.

Where to start

Pick the one that costs you most: the tender you could not price in time, the variation you could not evidence, or the retention you forgot to claim. Then look at the records you already keep for it. The first system is usually hiding there.