Final account

The final account is the agreed statement of the total sum due under a construction contract. It settles everything: the original contract sum as adjusted, all variations, the expenditure of provisional sums, claims for loss and expense, any liquidated damages, and the release of retention.

Agreeing it closes the commercial life of the project. Until it is agreed, the job is still open, however finished the building looks.

What it contains

The starting point is the contract sum. From there:

Variations, valued and agreed. Every instruction, priced and settled.

Provisional sums, with each allowance removed and the actual valued cost substituted, or omitted entirely where the work was never instructed.

Loss and expense, where prolongation or disruption entitles the contractor to recovery beyond the direct value of changed work.

Liquidated damages, deducted where the project completed late without an extension of time covering the delay.

Retention, released in line with the contract.

Why it takes so long

Because it is where every deferred argument arrives at once.

Variations that were instructed but never priced. Claims submitted without the records to support them. Disruption everyone acknowledges and nobody quantified at the time. Extensions of time applied for late, or not at all. Each of these was easier to resolve in the month it happened than it is a year later with a dispersed team.

What actually decides the outcome

Contemporaneous records. Not the strength of the argument at settlement, but what was written down at the time.

A contractor who can produce the written instruction, the priced variation, the site records showing the disruption and the notice given under the contract is negotiating from evidence. One relying on recollection and a reconstructed narrative is negotiating from a much weaker position, and experienced quantity surveyors on the other side know exactly how to test which they are facing.

Cash pressure compounds it. A contractor who needs the money now will accept less than they are owed, and everyone in the room understands that.

The practical implication

Final account performance is decided months before the negotiation, by whether the project kept its records as it went. Instructions confirmed in writing. Variations priced when instructed rather than at the end. Notices served within the contract’s timescales. A CVR carrying value at what is genuinely recoverable rather than what was hoped for.

Keeping that trail against the project as it accumulates, so settlement is a reconciliation rather than an archaeology exercise, is what Sync’s cost tracking and financial reporting are built to support.