Contract administrators play a pivotal role in ensuring the smooth execution of construction projects. Their responsibilities extend from managing contractual obligations to mitigating risks and facilitating communication between all parties involved. Given the complexity of their role, having a clear set of guidelines—or a rulebook—can greatly enhance their effectiveness. This article provides a comprehensive guide for contract administrators to follow, ensuring they uphold best practices and drive project success.

Proactively managing the contract admin process contributes to a smoother construction project and strengthens relationships between Architects, Designers, Engineers, and Clients. In this article, we explore these four roles.

In the construction industry, where projects are complex and often filled with uncertainties, effective risk management is crucial for ensuring successful project delivery. A key driver of robust risk management is thorough and proactive contract administration. This article explores how implementing sound contract administration practices can significantly enhance risk management in construction projects, leading to more predictable and successful outcomes.

Featured on the cover of Construction Tech Review’s May 2024 issue—Michael Copas, a visionary and founder of Statslog Software Corporation, contemplates his company’s journey spanning four decades in construction management.

Accounting is an accrual method of tracking financial transactions, reflective of the last observation plus, the current observation, that must equal observations to date. In contract administration the observation is, of what is observed to date, minus the observation of the past, to determine the current change in observation.

The above tagline has been with Statslog, almost from the beginning. It expressed the idea that everyone in the project team was doing the same thing only from their own perspective.

In FIVE, a user can now easily click and drag—an RFI issued by the contractor in an email, into the Request Tab to store the details of its contents plus the email message itself.

In the last article on this topic, we explored the outgoing forms of CCDC 24, this time we will review the incoming forms from your contractor and others. These forms are less structured and come from a variety of sources include your Client, the Owner, the contractor as mentioned, your Consultants, and depending on the contract type, each of the specialty trades.

FIVE was developed to help in completion of administration tasks of any Contract type. It does this by providing a single access for data, automated tracking of approvals, complex calculations, generation of forms and reports, easy assembly and linkage of support material for, distribution, storage, and retrieval.

Once every month on every project two mutually exclusive processes face off. Contractors submit a request for payment (Invoice) for services rendered, and designers are charged with assessing if that request is appropriate.

On LinkedIn, if you search “Contract Administrator” jobs—there are lots of opportunities in various types of construction including residential, commercial and industrial—in both the private and public sector. So, what is the role of a Contract Administrator, anyway?

Over the years, Statslog has built many standard forms. We observed some time ago that the standard set of forms presented in CCDC1 24—a guide to model forms and support documents would benefit from an update.

Over the past year we have been referring to MiMO x OOTB. These acronyms refer to “Minimum input—MAXIMUM OUTPUT” and “Out-of-the-Box”, two strategies that were applied to a Sample Project, now the basis of our Online Training Modules.

This blog will examine the triggers for Change, the content of Change descriptions, and the automation of some form elements to increase efficiency.

Holdback, retainage, and withholding are all terms used to describe monies withheld from the Contractor by the Owner. In Ontario, holdback is legislated as a percentage of the progress of work, and is intended to protect employees on a project site.

Our customers have amassed an impressive amount of project data over that time, and we’ve ensured that they can migrate it seamlessly from update to update. The missing piece—at least up until now—is that there hasn’t been an easy way to get an arm’s length view of all that accumulated project data. We’ve traditionally considered projects to be separate silos of unrelated information; but, the truth is that there are connecting threads between each and every project you work on.

The CCDC 24—a guide to model forms and support documents (for use with CCDC 2-1994) is a wonderful resource, but needs a significant review, before use.

In the early months of 2019, a search for contract administration software in Google will present you with a long list of contract management software. That same search for contract administration software in Wikipedia gets a note saying “the page does not exist”, and a search for contract administration repeats that result. Even when you enter construction contract administration you get the same note.