Free RIBA Contract Administrator Forms for use with RIBA Building Contracts

RIBA and NBS have published free Contract Administration Forms for use with the RIBA Building Contracts.

RIBA Building Contracts can be generated using the NBS online tool or bought in paper version from RIBA Bookshops. There is a Domestic version and a Concise version that may be used for residential and small commercial projects.
- ribacontracts.com

The screenshots below explain the process...

Generate your project-specific building contract online with the help of NBS guidance and suggested values

Generate a professional-looking PDF contract for the client and the contractor

Follow the link to download free useful forms and letters

A number of essential forms may be downloaded for either contract

Professional-looking Contract Administrator form, authored to work with the corresponding building contract

These free forms are the latest offering in an effort to provide for the whole industry.

On the smallest of jobs, a construction professional may use NBS Domestic Specification and the NBS RIBA Contracts service through their web browser on a pay-per-project basis. They may use tools like the NBS BIM Toolkit, National BIM Library and free forms and templates from RIBA Job Book and these contract administration forms for free.

On the largest of jobs, in addition to free resources, subscription services such as NBS Create and NBS Contract Administrator may be used to create efficiencies and reduce risks.

Upcoming maintenance releases of NBS software

Following some major releases of many of the NBS software products earlier in the year, we have been addressing some smaller items of work over recent months. The following will be released in July/August 2010...

NBS Building, Engineering and Landscape

• Security issues in Guidance
  
  The technology we use for the NBS Guidance is Microsoft CHM files. Recently Microsoft have been tightening up security for CHM file use on networks and this has been causing a number of problems for NBS customers. This will be resolved by creating a cache of these libraries locally on users’ machines. 
• Alignment tweak in the published output
  
  There is a 2 or 3 pixel alignment problem where a clause follows a sub heading. This will be fixed.

NBS Scheduler (view more detailed blog post)

• Export dialog
  
  Enhancements to the export functionality to allow export to Autodesk and Microstation keynote format 
• Prelims tweaks
  
  Improvements to Prelims addressing issues where user clauses were not printing correctly 
• Document completeness
  
  At the point of publish, an indication to the document completeness is given. 
• Spell checker in prelims
  
  The addition of a spell checker in prelims 
• PDF merge
  
  The ability to merge PDF documents to create a single document

NBS Contract Administrator

• Instruction forms
  Additional spaces and clipped text on Instruction forms and improved performance on open 
• Database upgrade for D&B contractsIssue fixed if Employer or Employers Agent were already in DB. 
• Practical completion
  Rectification date chanes or all JCT 2005 contracts 
• Cost Tracking module
  The inclusion of the NBS Tools module and in particular the Cost Tracking that allows tender comparisons, valuations to be summarised and these costs to be tracked. 

NBS Perspective

• Improved email filing
  Flexibility on how email attachments are filed
• Ability to set home page to Intranet site
  When Perspective starts up – the ability to choose any web URL to start at
• Ability to add domains to whitelist
  Whole domains (eg thenbs.com) can be added to the white list

NBS Tools

• Updating of annotation fileBug fixed where annotation data cache file did not update immediately following the modification of a specification.

Design and Build Contract Administration

The main improvement for the 2009 release of NBS Contract Administrator is the inclusion of the forms for use on the JCT 05 Design and Build Contract.

The forms for this contract have been one of the most requested enhancements to the product over the last few years from users. This now means that NBS Contract Administrator can be used on more projects and there will be also maybe be some new converts to the product who work mainly on Design and Build projects.

The new software has been designed in a way that allows the relevant Design and Build forms to be used whether working on behalf of the employer or on behalf of the contractor. This means that unlike the other contract administration forms – where the forms themselves don’t change, but the person issuing them does – users will be presented with a different set of forms depending on which role is selected.