What is a final account?

The final account is the contract sum, the price you originally agreed, adjusted for everything the job actually became: variations (changes to the work that was priced), provisional sums (allowances put in the contract for work that could not be priced exactly at the start), claims (extra money for delay and disruption caused by the other side) and set-offs (amounts the payer holds back for its own counter-claims). Almost no project finishes at its tender figure, so the final account reconciles the original price and the built reality into one closing number that ends the money side of the contract. It is less a single document than an argument set out like a ledger: every head, measured work, changes, loss and expense, retention, has its own basis in the contract and needs its own evidence, so the account is only as strong as its weakest supported line. Whoever prepares it should be able to point, for every figure, to the clause that entitles them to it and the records that prove it.

Picture a groundworks contractor on a warehouse project tendered at £620,000. The employer instructs deeper foundations after a ground survey, a variation worth £74,000; a provisional sum of £40,000 for drainage is finally measured at £51,000; and the contractor claims £18,000 of loss and expense for a six week wait while the employer resolved a boundary issue. The employer, meanwhile, wants to set off £9,000 for a section it says was left incomplete. It all lands in one ledger: 620,000 plus the 74,000 variation, plus the extra 11,000 on the drainage, plus the 18,000 claim, less the 9,000 the employer is pushing, giving a closing figure the two sides argue over line by line. Each figure stands or falls on its own clause and records, so the contractor who kept the survey, the drainage measure, the delay diary and the completion photographs is the one whose number holds.