Product guides
Guides
How to use each part of VariationFlow, step by step, in two or three minutes a guide. Written for the QS, commercial manager and site manager at a UK specialist subcontractor.
Getting started
Your workspace, your team, your first project and its contract profile.
Getting started: your workspace, your team and your first project
Set up VariationFlow for a specialist subcontractor: create the workspace, sign the company agreement, invite the team on the right roles, add your first project with its payment terms and get the site team capturing.
3 min readRead the guideThe contract setup wizard: payment calendar, retention and the onerous-clause sweep
Turn a signed subcontract into a working contract profile in about ten minutes: the form, the payment calendar and your own payment terms, retention, the NEC programme and the ten clauses that cost subcontractors money.
3 min readRead the guideCapturing variations
On site with the app, from the office, and by forwarding an email.
Capturing a variation on site with the mobile app
How a supervisor or operative logs a variation on the phone in about a minute: photos, GPS, a voice note, the requester’s signature, the work-proceeded flag, and what happens with no signal.
3 min readRead the guideCapturing from the office: the web form, Site Capture and email-in
Three more ways into the register: the New Variation form on the web, the Site Capture page for a shared tablet, and the project’s forwarding address for instructions that arrive by email.
3 min readRead the guideRunning variations
The register, pricing, and getting the instruction in writing.
The variation register and its stages
Read the register at a glance: draft, active and rejected references, every stage from Potential Variation to Paid, ageing colours, contract clock labels, filters, export and import.
3 min readRead the guidePricing a variation: the build-up, valuation bases and your schedule of rates
Record how a variation’s value is reached so it can be defended: choose the valuation basis, price from the tender’s schedule of rates, attach your spreadsheet and keep signed daywork records.
3 min readRead the guideSubmitting a variation and getting the instruction
Send a priced variation to the main contractor with a review link they can action without an account, and know what to do with each answer: agreed, a counter-price, under review or rejected.
3 min readRead the guideContracts and deadlines
Payment notices, NEC4 and JCT clocks, and the late-payment letter.
Contract deadlines: Construction Act payment dates, NEC4 and JCT notices
How VariationFlow diarises the payment notice, pay-less notice and final date and counts them under s.116, runs the NEC4 subcontract compensation event clocks and the JCT notices, and why a JCT project asks you to record its periods.
3 min readRead the guideLate-payment letters: interest, compensation and the final date
Produce a letter before action from an unpaid valuation: the outstanding sum, interest under the Late Payment Act or your contract’s own rate, fixed compensation, and the checks to make before it goes.
3 min readRead the guideValuations and getting paid
Monthly applications, certification, payment and retention.
Monthly valuations and payment applications
Build a cumulative interim application on the project page, pull in instructed and completed variations, produce the s.110A application or a default payment notice, export for a portal and email it to the client.
3 min readRead the guideRecording payment, settling variations and releasing retention
Log certification and payment against a valuation, settle its variations in one pass, record part payments on a single variation and release retention in its two halves.
2 min readRead the guideRecords and reporting
The dashboard and project health, CVR, the site diary and the audit trail.
The recovery dashboard and ageing alerts
Use the Revenue Dashboard as the Friday-afternoon view: the executive view of forecast margin, cash due and project health, what is submitted, instructed and outstanding, and the 28 and 42-day ageing alerts.
3 min readRead the guideCost value reconciliation (CVR)
Run a monthly CVR per contract: value from your valuations against cost by head, with the tender as the budget, costs uploaded from your accounts, provisions and the forecast, and a health mark from the last two reports.
3 min readRead the guideKeeping the site diary
Two minutes a day: who was on site, what was done, what got in the way and what was instructed, with photos, exported as a print-ready record for any date range.
2 min readRead the guideThe audit trail, the evidence pack and exporting your data
What the hash-chained audit trail records, how to produce the audit PDF and the evidence pack ZIP for a portal or an adjudication, and how to take a full copy of your data.
2 min readRead the guideDomestic work
Homeowner quotes with deposits and stage payments, extras, cancellation notices and invoices.
QA Flow
Inspection forms, hold points, quality registers, RAMS and handover.
QA Flow: inspection forms, ITPs and hold points
Build a form template once, apply it room by room, run it on site with readings, photos and failures that raise NCRs, and get hold and witness points signed by the main contractor from an email link.
3 min readRead the guideQA Flow: NCRs, snags, RFIs and submittals
Run the quality registers: raise and close NCRs with a disposition, manage snags by trade from the phone, and send RFIs and submittals to the main contractor with a reply period that is chased.
3 min readRead the guideQA Flow: RAMS, the O&M manual and handover
Issue RAMS as versions for operatives to read and sign on their phones, build the O&M manual as documents arrive, and produce the handover pack and the project ZIP at the end of the job.
2 min readRead the guideIntegrations
The Xero connection: built and being tested, not yet switched on.
Looking for something else?
The blog covers the contract law behind the product: valuing variations, payment notices, NEC4 and JCT. The free recovery health check looks at one of your live jobs and reports what is recoverable.