Quantity Surveyor and Cost Consultant Insurance

Most quantity surveyors expect a claim about a cost plan. The claims that actually hurt come from interim valuations.

Valuing work for payment means certifying that it has been done and is worth the sum certified. In practice valuations are produced under time pressure, from a contractor's application, on a site you walked for an hour, with materials on site and work partly complete. Certify generously and nothing happens, because the contractor completes and the position corrects itself. Certify generously and the contractor becomes insolvent, and the client has paid for work that does not exist and cannot recover it from anybody except you.

That changes how valuations should be approached. Measure rather than accept the application, value materials on site only where title and protection are satisfied, keep the photographic and measurement record behind each valuation, and resist the pressure to release money against a promise of progress. Contractor insolvency is what converts an error into a loss, so the discipline matters most exactly when a contractor is under financial strain and pressing hardest.

If a project is going to produce a claim against its quantity surveyor, it usually arrives at the final account.

By then the variations are contested, the loss and expense claim is in, the programme has slipped and both parties are looking at the numbers that were agreed along the way. A variation valued without proper instruction, an extension of time assessed without the records to support it, or a loss and expense claim settled too generously or refused too firmly all become allegations, and the client's position is that they relied on your assessment.

Which puts record keeping at the centre of the job rather than at the end. Instructions in writing before work proceeds, variations valued and agreed as they occur rather than retrospectively, records of delay events kept contemporaneously, and reasoning documented for every significant assessment. The practices that defend final account claims successfully are those where the file shows the thinking at the time rather than a conclusion reconstructed afterwards.

Quantity surveyors are drawn into things outside cost constantly, and the cheapest protection in this profession is writing down what you were appointed to do.

A client who engaged you for cost management will ask whether the work looks acceptable, whether the contractor's programme is realistic, whether a design change is sensible, and whether they should pay a disputed claim. Answer in an email and you have given advice on quality, programme and design on an appointment that covered none of them, at a fee that priced none of them. After a dispute, the question is what a reasonably competent professional in your position should have advised, and your position is defined by what the appointment says.

So the practical items are specific: a written appointment on recognised terms for every instruction including small ones and repeat clients, scope stated positively and with exclusions, a net contribution clause so you are not pursued for other consultants' share, a liability cap that bears some relation to your fee rather than the project value, and care with collateral warranties, which extend who can sue you and for how long. Where scope grows, vary the appointment rather than absorbing it.

There is one cyber exposure that hits this profession specifically rather than generally, and it is worth naming.

A quantity surveyor's email traffic contains payment certificates, bank details, application amounts and the dates money moves. That makes the mailbox valuable to anybody running an invoice redirection fraud: compromise or spoof it, intercept a certificate, change the account details, and a six figure payment goes to a criminal. The client pays again and the argument about who bears it involves you.

Controls are ordinary and effective: multi factor authentication on email without exception, bank detail changes verified by telephone to a number held on file rather than one in the email, a rule that payment details are never changed on email instruction alone, and staff who know the pattern. Worth checking the cyber wording too, because social engineering and funds transfer fraud are frequently sub-limited well below the headline limit or excluded from a basic policy.

Certification is the question that separates a useful placement from a generic one. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.