Project overheads
The Code of Estimating Practice, seventh edition, published by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) in 2009 suggests that project overheads (sometimes referred to as site overheads, preliminaries, general cost items or expenses) are:
| The cost of those site-specific project costs that cannot allocated to individual activities and which are not included in all-in or composite rates. Among other things, these costs may include site management, huts, safety precautions, job-related insurances, bonding costs, telephone, water, electricity costs, etc. The essential characteristic is that these overheads serve more than one activity, e.g. tower crane, skips, general site labour, etc. However, in practice some resources that could be allocated to an activity, e.g. scaffolding for falsework, are included in the preliminaries because of the contractor’s preferred method of pricing. |
See also: Preliminaries.
--CIOB
[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings Wiki
- Attendance.
- Bills of quantities.
- Chartered Institute of Building.
- Code of Estimating Practice.
- Contract sum.
- Cost consultant.
- Cost control.
- Cost plans for construction projects.
- How to calculate head office overheads and profit.
- Mark-up.
- Method statements.
- New Rules of Measurement.
- Overheads.
- Pre-construction information.
- Preliminaries.
- Prime cost contract.
- Profit and overheads on construction projects
- Provisional sums.
- Standard Method of Measurement.
- Tender documents.
- Tender.
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