Completion, defects and aftercare

The end of a job is where the money and the goodwill both go. A homeowner who is delighted on the day can be furious four months later, and it is almost always about the same three things: what "finished" meant, whose fault something is, and when the rest of the money is coming.

Practical completion is an event

Not a status you tick. It is the day the work became usable and the client took the building back, and signing it off in BuildFlow does four things at once:

1. 1.Starts the defects period.
2. 2.Makes the first half of any retention due.
3. 3.Hands responsibility for the building — including insuring it — back to the client.
4. 4.Tells them, so nobody is working from a different date.

Builders read practical completion as "job's done". Homeowners read it as "everything is finished". Most of what they later argue about lives in the gap between those two readings, which is why BuildFlow asks for a date, a defects period and a note rather than flipping a switch.

Signing off does not close your snag list. If items are still open BuildFlow says so — and they are now things somebody is looking at from inside their own house.

A snag is not a defect

They are kept apart deliberately. One list holding both would show "still on the punch list" and "the shower has leaked into the kitchen ceiling" the same way, and those are not the same problem.

The defects register

Anyone on the job can report a defect, the client included. That is the point of it: a register only the builder can write to records what the builder noticed, which is not the problem it exists to solve.

The form asks a homeowner for one thing — what is wrong — plus where, and anything else worth knowing. It does not ask them to categorise it or say whose fault it is. Those are your decisions, and asking the person who found it to guess is how a register fills up with wrong answers.

Whose is it?

Only your side can answer that, and it is worth answering even when the answer is "not ours".

Anything that is not yours needs a reason, and BuildFlow will not record it without one. The client reads what you write. A year of these also tells you something you cannot get any other way — whether your problem is your own work, a trade you keep using, or a product you keep specifying.

How long you are actually liable

This is the part that costs people, so it is worth being blunt.

A defects period is not a limitation period. Six or twelve months is a contractual arrangement about who comes back and fixes things for free. It says nothing about how long a homeowner can bring a claim.

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 a service must be carried out with reasonable care and skill. Where it was not, a homeowner generally has six years to bring a claim in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and five in Scotland — and those clocks do not start at practical completion in every case.

Retention

Money the client holds back as security that you will come back. Set the percentage on the job's Money tab; the usual arrangement is a few percent, released in two halves.

BuildFlow shows what is held, what has been released and what is left, and will not let you release anything before practical completion — there is nothing to release it against. The amounts are recorded rather than calculated rigidly, so a part release or a figure you negotiated survives.

Practical completion can be undone if you got the date wrong, but not once retention has been released against it. The money has moved.

Closing the job

Close the job records final completion — the end of the defects period, certified.

BuildFlow will let you do it with defects still open, deliberately. A builder and a client are perfectly entitled to agree the job is closed with two small things outstanding, and a tool that blocked it would simply be worked around. It tells you what is open and lets you decide.

Guarantees

What is covered, who honours it, and until when. Your own workmanship guarantee, the manufacturer's on the boiler, the installer's on the roof, any insurance-backed policy.

It prints in the handover pack, and it is the page most used five years on. A homeowner with a leaking flat roof rings the builder because the builder is the only name they have — this is what turns that call into a claim on the right person.

What the client sees

• Reports a defect, and watches where it gets to.
• The retention position — it is their money being held.
• The guarantees, because a guarantee nobody knows about is worth nothing.

They do not see whose fault anything is until you have decided, and they cannot change a status or close anything. The register is only useful as a record if one side of it is not writable by the side it is about.