, Building
A kitchen fitter in Taunton quotes £9,400 for a full replacement. The units come out on the Monday. Behind them is a wall that has been wet for a decade, a gas run that was never notified, and a floor that is 40mm out over three metres.
He does the work, because leaving is worse. He sends a final invoice for £11,850. The customer pays £9,400 and says the rest was never agreed. Both of them are describing the same fortnight and neither is lying.
A quote and an estimate are different promises
The words are not interchangeable, and the difference is the one thing most domestic disputes turn on.
A quote is an offer of a fixed price for a defined scope. Once accepted, it forms a contract at that price, and you carry the risk of anything within the scope costing more than you thought. An estimate is a considered indication of likely cost, which can move as the work is better understood. Neither word is magic, and a court will look at what was actually said and written rather than the heading on the document, but the heading is a start.
For domestic work, the honest structure is usually a fixed price for the parts you can see and specify, and named allowances for the parts you cannot. What ruins a job is a fixed price that quietly includes a guess about something nobody has looked at.
Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, where no price has been agreed, the customer pays a reasonable price, and services must be performed with reasonable care and skill within a reasonable time. Relying on that is far worse than agreeing a number. Reasonable is decided afterwards, by somebody else.
Day rate has a place: investigation work, repairs where nobody knows the extent, and small jobs where the pricing exercise costs more than the job. Domestic clients are usually uncomfortable with an open day rate, and the fix is a cap with a review point. Say what the rate is, what it includes, how many hours a day, what happens to materials, and at what figure you both stop and reassess.
Provisional sums are honest if you explain them
Borrow the idea from commercial contracts and simplify it. A provisional sum is a figure included in the price for work that cannot yet be defined, which will be replaced by the real cost when it can.
Write them as line items, in plain terms: "Allowance for replacing joists, £900. If fewer are rotten, you pay less. If more are rotten, you pay more, and we will tell you before we do it."
Three rules make them work. Say what triggers the adjustment. Say who decides, which should be a jointly witnessed look at the opened-up work rather than your word for it. And agree the variation before the work, in writing, even if writing means a text message with a number in it. A photograph of a rotten joist and a message saying "eleven not six, this adds £540, shall I proceed" is a better contractual record than most formal contracts a small builder will ever sign.
The category of work with the most provisional sums is anything in an old house behind a finish: floors, walls, roofs, drains and electrics. If your quote for a Victorian bathroom has no allowances in it at all, you have not priced the job, you have priced the drawing.
The homeowner is buying a finished room, not a list of tasks
Commercial clients read scope. Domestic clients read outcome. They think they are buying a kitchen, and a kitchen includes the plastering, the skirting, the making good, the tiling, the waste removal, the electrician, the final clean and putting the old appliances somewhere other than the drive.
So write the exclusions in the same size text as the inclusions and put them where they will be read. Not on page four. Common ones that cause arguments: decoration and making good, floor covering, moving the gas or water supply, skip and waste, appliance disposal, scaffolding, building control fees, structural calculations, asbestos survey and removal, and any work needed because of something hidden.
Put the programme in, with the dependencies named. "Three weeks on site, subject to worktop templating, which takes ten working days after the units are fitted" manages the expectation that otherwise becomes a complaint.
Say whether VAT is included, in terms, if you are registered. A consumer reads a number as the number they will pay.
Then stage the payments so that you are never far out of pocket and the customer is never far ahead. For a job of a few weeks, a deposit that covers ordered materials, one or two interim payments tied to visible stages, and a final payment on completion. Tie the stages to things a homeowner can see rather than to percentages of a programme they cannot judge. Avoid taking a large deposit for work that has not started: it is the main reason domestic builders end up arguing about consumer protection, and on any card payment it also raises your chargeback exposure.
The cancellation rules catch builders who have never heard of them
This is the trap with the biggest teeth, and it is routinely missed.
If you agree a contract with a consumer somewhere other than your own business premises, which for most builders means at the customer's kitchen table, that is an off-premises contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. So is a contract concluded entirely at a distance, by phone or email.
Those regulations give the consumer 14 days to cancel, from the day the contract is made for a service. They also require you to give prescribed pre-contract information and a notice of the right to cancel, in a durable form.
Two consequences follow. If you want to start work inside the 14 days, you need the customer's express request to do so, and an acknowledgement that they will lose the right to cancel once the service is fully performed. If you do neither and start anyway, you may have no right to be paid for work done in that window.
And if you never give the cancellation notice at all, the cancellation period is extended by up to 12 months. A customer who falls out with you in month nine can cancel a contract you finished in month two. Failing to provide the required information is also an offence in relation to certain off-premises contracts.
The remedy is a single sheet of paper, given with every quote, saying what the right is, how to use it, and including the model cancellation form. It takes one afternoon to prepare and it removes an entire category of risk.
While you are at it, decide what you are offering as a guarantee and say so plainly. An insurance-backed guarantee through a scheme such as TrustMark or a trade body is worth having if you want to compete on reassurance rather than price. A verbal promise that you will "come back and sort anything" is a liability with no end date.
Where this shows up in the game
The trades are part of Business Baron's full game, and the Plumber & Heating Engineer is one of the five business types you can run for nothing. A trade business quotes work with a labour estimate and a materials estimate, and the actual is not the estimate. Charging a day rate hands the overrun to the customer, and pricing the job keeps it with you.