Our Contract Management Services

Under every construction contract one person or firm is named as the contract administrator — often the quantity surveyor, sometimes the project manager or architect. That role carries specific duties and specific timescales, and failing to meet them has consequences under the contract. The work covers:

• Managing the contractual correspondence and issuing the notices the contract requires, within the periods it specifies.
• Preparing and agreeing the works programme and the cash flow projections against it.
• Processing applications for payment, measuring and valuing the work, and preparing or checking the interim valuations and payment certificates.
• Valuing variations and keeping the contract sum, the cash flow and the budget aligned as the works change.
• Preparing schedules of materials and labour, and quotation bills from drawings or from physical measurements.
• Drafting and defending contractual claims, and managing the correspondence and letters that support them.
• Drafting and agreeing the final account.
• Support on pre-qualification and expressions of interest, and pricing of tender documents.
• Providing resident and site-based quantity surveyors for continuous contractual oversight on larger projects.

We administer whichever form of contract governs your project, and we work to what that contract requires rather than applying a house style. The forms most commonly encountered in Kenya are:

The form matters because it determines the notice periods, the payment periods, the certification mechanism, the grounds and procedures for extension of time, the route a claim must take and the dispute resolution ladder. If you have not yet chosen a form of contract, we advise on the options and the risk each carries before the tender is issued.

Contractors in Kenya are not paid for effort or for time on site; they are paid for work measured and valued under the contract. The mechanism is the interim valuation, followed by the payment certificate.

• The contractor submits an application for payment, normally monthly, setting out the value it claims for the period.
• The contract administrator measures the work actually executed, values it at the rates in the contract or the Bill of Quantities, and agrees or adjusts the measured quantities.
• Any materials on site or off-site materials that the contract allows to be paid for are valued and added.
• The valuation is reduced by retention at the percentage the contract states, and by any earlier payments made.
• The certified amount is then issued as the interim payment certificate, and the employer pays within the period stated in the contract — commonly 30 days, with interest or other consequences if the certificate or the payment is late.

Where we act for the employer we measure and value the work independently rather than accepting the contractor’s submission; where we act for a contractor we prepare the application and support it with the measurement. Either way the objective is the same — a valuation that can be checked line by line, so the payment is not in dispute.

A variation is a change to the works, the specification or the programme instructed after the contract was signed. Variations are the point at which a project most often loses its budget, and the risk is not that changes happen — it is that they are executed before they are valued.

• Every variation should be instructed in writing by the person the contract gives the power to instruct, before the work is done.
• The quantity surveyor then values it: by measurement against the rates in the Bill of Quantities where the work is of similar character, by a fair valuation where it is not, and where necessary by negotiation or by a daywork account.
• The value is reported in the next cost report, so the anticipated final cost moves as the change is made rather than being reconstructed at completion.
• Where a change also affects the programme, the time consequence is dealt with separately through the extension of time provisions — a variation in cost does not automatically carry an entitlement to time.

A claim is a request for additional money or time that is not covered by a measured variation. On Kenyan projects the common ones are claims for delay, disruption, prolongation, acceleration, and claims arising from late or incomplete information.

A claim is decided largely by the records. The contract will require notice within a stated period of the event being known, and an account of the effect as it develops. A claim that is made for the first time at the end of a project, without notices and without contemporaneous records, is difficult to sustain even where the underlying event was real.

• We draft and defend contractual claims, including the notices, the substantiation and the correspondence.
• We quantify the cost element — preliminaries extended over the delay period, plant standing, supervision, escalation and loss of productivity.
• We work with the programme evidence to establish which events actually affected completion, rather than simply listing everything that went wrong.
• We keep the claim correspondence in a form that will stand up if the matter goes to adjudication or arbitration.

The final account is the measured statement of what the project actually cost under the contract once every variation, claim, adjustment and deduction has been resolved. It is the point at which retention is released and the contract is brought to an end.

• The works are measured as built, and any difference between the quantities in the original Bill of Quantities and the quantities actually built is adjusted.
• Every instructed variation is checked against the instruction list, so nothing instructed is paid for twice and nothing instructed is left unpaid.
• Provisional sums and prime cost sums are replaced with the actual cost of the work they covered.
• Any claim that remains live is resolved, negotiated or referred to the dispute resolution route in the contract.
• Fluctuations, interest on late payment, retention and any liquidated damages are applied as the contract provides.

An account that is left unsigned is not neutral — it keeps retention frozen, keeps the contractor’s security in place and keeps the project open on both parties’ books. Most of the difficult final accounts we are appointed to resolve have the same cause: variations that were executed without being valued at the time.

On larger or faster-moving projects, periodic attendance is not enough. We provide resident and site-based quantity surveyors who work from the site for the duration of the works, providing continuous measurement, valuation and contractual oversight.

• Measuring work as it is executed, so quantities are recorded while the work is still visible and before it is covered up.
• Valuing variations as they arise rather than from records months later.
• Maintaining schedules of materials and labour and the daywork records.
• Handling the day-to-day contractual correspondence and keeping the notice register up to date.
• Preparing applications for payment or the valuations and cost reports that follow from them.

Whether you are an employer with a project running, a contractor preparing a claim, or a consultant preparing a bid, send us the documents and we will tell you where you stand.

• The contract, including the conditions, the appendix and any special conditions.
• The Bill of Quantities and the priced tender, if available.
• The programme and any updates issued.
• The contractual correspondence and the notice register so far.
• Any claim, valuation or final account already in dispute.

We administer contracts, value claims and settle final accounts on projects across Kenya, from Nairobi and on site where the project requires it.