General Contractors Editing and Proofreading Services

The subcontract says the price includes everything necessary for the proper completion of the works. Three months later the plasterer wants paying for the scaffold, the labourer who moves the boards, the skip, the temporary lighting, the standing time when the ceiling grid was not ready, and the protection to the finished floor. All of it is necessary. None of it is in his rates. Somebody has to pay for it, and the argument is about a paragraph nobody read.

We edit what general contractors produce — subcontract scopes and schedules of deemed inclusions, attendance and facilities schedules, subcontract enquiries and tender documents, order confirmations and scope clarifications, variation and instruction records, valuation and payment notice documentation, programme and access commitments to subcontractors, site rules and logistics documentation, quality and inspection requirements passed down, defect and rectification correspondence, and final account and close-out documentation. Our editors work on the schedule that decides what is included.

The subcontract scope and its deemed inclusions is where a contractor's margin is either protected or spent, and its failure is a catch-all sentence standing in for a list. "All work necessary to complete" means whatever is convenient to each party at the moment it matters. We work through these so the attendances the contractor provides are listed item by item — scaffold and who adapts it, power and lighting and to what point, water, welfare, waste and who empties it, hoisting and its booked hours, task lighting, protection of finished work — since every unlisted item is an argument with a fifty per cent chance of going the wrong way; so the items the subcontractor provides are listed with the same specificity, including small plant, consumables, setting out from established datums, and their own protection; so anything genuinely shared is described with the mechanism for sharing it, given that a shared scaffold with no adaptation regime produces daily disputes; so access and readiness commitments are stated as conditions rather than as a programme, because standing time claims begin where a promise of access was vague; so the exclusions the subcontractor stated in their tender are either accepted into the order or rejected in writing, as silence is treated as acceptance; and so nothing important is carried only in an email. Scopes written this way produce final accounts that settle.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including subcontracts, commercial terms and project information. We are editors rather than quantity surveyors or contract advisers, and we offer no view on entitlement, valuation or contractual risk. What we can do is turn a catch-all sentence into a list both parties priced.