What are unrecovered variations costing you?

How the sum works

• Value at risk is your turnover times the share you think is exposed to variation under-recovery.
• Recovered is that value at risk times the recovery uplift you believe.
• Net benefit is the recovered figure less the plan's annual price, billed annually and shown ex VAT.
• The multiple is the recovered figure divided by the plan's annual price.

Nothing else goes in. There is no industry average applied on top of your figures and no multiplier you cannot see.

Choosing the at-risk figure

Count the variation value that leaks between site and final account: work done on a verbal instruction and never priced, variations priced and never agreed, sums agreed below their worth because the evidence was thin, and entitlement lost to a missed notice, such as the seven weeks to notify a compensation event under an NEC4 subcontract.

Your own final accounts are the best source. Compare the variations you claimed with what was agreed, job by job, and decide how much of the gap was real entitlement.

For scale, the Get It Right Initiative puts the direct cost of avoidable error at around 5% of project value, and the total at 10 to 25% once indirect costs are counted. That covers every kind of error, not only unrecovered variations, and it is a cost rather than revenue you can recover, which is why the default here is 2%.

Choosing the recovery uplift

This is the share of the at-risk value you would expect to recover with every change captured on site with photos, GPS and a timestamp, every variation aged on a register with alerts at 28 and 42 days, and the NEC, JCT and Construction Act deadlines counted for you.

It is an assumption, and the default of 40% is ours, not a measured result. If you would only believe 10%, set 10% and see whether the plan still pays for itself.