Prime contracts

The prime contract is the owner agreement the job is billed from. It carries an executed value, a schedule of values that value is broken into, the commercial terms it runs on, and the owner change orders that revise it.

Open it from Prime Contract in the LEDGER rail. A project usually carries one, but the register handles more.

The Contracts tool defaults to NONE on every seed role except Project Manager. Reading needs READ_ONLY; every change needs STANDARD plus the Manage prime contracts (lifecycle, SOV, amendments) permission, which Contracts ADMIN carries automatically.

Record the contract

1. Open Prime Contract and click the new-contract action.
2. Enter the title, the parties, and the original value.
3. Attach the executed PDF from Drive.
4. Walk it through its lifecycle.

Lifecycle

Status	What it means
Draft	Being prepared
Out for Signature	Sent for execution
Executed	Signed. The resting state of a healthy contract
Complete	Closed out. Terminal
Terminated	Ended early. Terminal

Action	From	To
Send for signature	Draft	Out for Signature
Withdraw	Out for Signature	Draft
Mark executed	Out for Signature	Executed
Mark complete	Executed	Complete
Terminate	Executed	Terminated

There is no reopen. Complete and Terminated are both terminal.

The value stats

The detail view carries four figures, all computed rather than stored:

Figure	How it is derived
Original value	What you entered on the contract
Executed change orders	The sum of amendments at Executed status. Credits render distinctly
Revised value	Original value plus executed amendments
Schedule of values	The sum of the SOV lines

Under the schedule of values figure the register says whether it is Balanced to the contract value, or how much is unallocated, or Not entered yet.

Schedule of values

The SOV breaks the contract value into billable items. Each line carries an item code, a description and a scheduled value.

The schedule must sum exactly to the contract's original value. Saving an SOV that does not balance is refused. A line that already carries billing cannot be removed.

Each line also carries a bill type letter, printed as entered. Only B has a defined meaning in the product; the others are recorded and rendered rather than interpreted.

Once billing starts, the SOV is what the owner pay application worksheet is built from.

Commercial terms

The value stats say what the contract is worth. The terms panel says how it is meant to work: when applications are due, what retainage is held and when it comes back, what the allowances and alternates are, who carries builders risk, what a day of delay costs.

Terms are read out of the attached PDF by an explicit, metered analysis that you confirm before anything is stored. Every value carries the printed pages it came from, so "where does it say that" is one click away. A value the model stated without naming a page is flagged as uncited rather than given a page it did not give.

Term groups cover identity and time, payment, retainage, financial structure, insurance and bonds, and clauses. Among them:

• Contract type, agreement date, commencement, substantial and final completion
• Billing cycle, application due day, payment due days, pay-when-paid, stored materials
• Retainage rate, stored-materials retainage rate, reduction and release conditions
• CM fee, general conditions, contingency, savings split, allowances, alternates, unit prices
• Insurance requirements, builders risk, payment and performance bonds
• Liquidated damages per day, warranty period, dispute resolution, governing law, termination for convenience, notice days, change-order markup, audit rights

Applying an extracted set is a separate, permissioned write, and it is checked against the document twice: the attached file must still be the one that was read, and if the read recorded a Drive version, the live version has to still match. Drive keeps the same item id when a file is re-uploaded, so the version check is what catches a document that was replaced after the read.

Terms are a record of what the contract says. Retainage on your billing runs off the retainage schedule set on the contract itself, not off this panel. See Retainage.

Read the SOV out of the PDF

The register also offers an extraction that proposes SOV lines from the executed document. It returns a proposal for you to confirm; discarding it leaves the already-uploaded PDF in place. Both this and the terms read are metered AI operations, capped at a 4 MB source PDF for the SOV read and 100 pages for the terms read.

Owner change orders (amendments)

An amendment is an owner change order against the prime contract. It carries a value, and only amendments at Executed move the revised value.

Status	Effect
Draft	Recorded. Moves nothing
Executed	Counted into the revised value
Void	Terminal

Draft can go to Executed or Void. Executed can go to Void. Void is terminal.

Amendments attach only to an executed contract. Creating one against a contract that is not executed is refused:

Owner change orders attach to an executed contract. Execute the contract first.

Most amendments are created for you by promoting priced change orders out of the change chain rather than typed by hand. See Change management.

Limits

Limit	Value
Contract rows per project	4,000
Schedule-of-values lines per contract	500
Amendments per contract	500
Title length	200 characters
Description length	500 characters
Party name length	160 characters

Troubleshooting

The schedule of values will not save. It does not sum to the contract's original value. The detail header shows the unallocated amount.

A schedule-of-values line will not delete. It carries billing. Set its scheduled value or scope differently rather than removing the line.

Creating an amendment is refused. The contract is not executed yet.

Applying extracted terms is refused. The attached document changed since the read. Run the analysis again against the current file.