Preliminaries — "prelims" — are the costs of running the project that don't belong to any single item of measured work: site management and supervision, welfare and accommodation, temporary services, access equipment, scaffolding, waste, insurances, protection of finished work. They are the price of being on the job, as distinct from the price of the work itself.
On a typical commercial fit-out or specialist package, prelims commonly run between 8% and 15% of the tender — which makes them, on most jobs, the single largest "item" in the price.
Why it matters
Because prelims are time-driven, not quantity-driven. A partitioning package measured perfectly still loses money if the programme slips six weeks and the supervision, welfare and access costs run on. When a client compares two tenders, the measured rates are usually close — the difference, and often the winner's regret, lives in the prelims.
Pricing them means pricing the programme: how long you'll be on site, with what management, what equipment, and what happens to those costs if the job extends for reasons that are — and aren't — your fault.
How it goes wrong
Two ways. Prelims priced as a lazy percentage of measured work, which bears no relation to programme reality; or prelims priced honestly but never tracked, so nobody notices that fourteen weeks of supervision have been spent on a ten-week allowance. The second is more expensive, because it is invisible until reconciliation.
In Vyntworks, prelims are priced as explicit lines in the estimate and tracked like any other cost through live CVR — so an extending programme shows up as an overspending line while there is still something to be done about it.