Construction Contract Components

NOTE-- We retired MacNail construction software, back in 2000. Replacing it is Goldenseal, a complete software package for Macintosh and Windows that handles construction spec writing, plus accounting, construction estimating, and project management, Goldenseal uses a similar process for creating contracts, subcontracts and specification sheets. It's also more flexible, since it can get contract details from change orders, allowances, leases, or project estimates.

Contract Components

The MacNail project specifications software builds a contract document by assembling four different types of components.

* Headers are text documents that are placed at the beginning of a contract. They can spell out conditions of work, terms of payment, and any other 'boiler plate' legal language that you'd like to include (see pages 24-26).
* Stock Clauses are simple contract clauses that can be added anywhere in a contract. Some of them use specific project information such as the bid amount and the name of the client (see pages 105-109).
* Specifications are detailed descriptions of each piece of work that goes into a project. They are assembled into plain English-language sentences, using information from the Specifications portion of an estimate (see pages 34-37).
* Footers are identical to Headers, but they are placed at the end of the contract document (see pages 24-26).

A contract may consist of any or all of these components, depending on the exact purpose for which it will be used.

NOTE: For a diagram of contract components, see page 32.

Types of Output Files

The MacNail construction management software lets you create a Spec Writer contract in either of two forms:
* As a text document that you can open, format and print from any word processor program (see pages 80-87).
* As a spreadsheet document that you can open, format and print from Excel (see pages 88-95).

In either case, you can format the contract any way you'd like before you print it, or you can copy and paste its text into some other program.