About
The set-out is the first physical act on site.
Pegs in the ground, lines transferred from the drawing to the dirt. We're named for it because that's where everything either goes right or quietly goes wrong.
Setout is a contract administration practice for South African construction and infrastructure projects. We sit on the employer's side of the table. Compensation events assessed against Clause 60.1. Programmes accepted or rejected against Clause 31. Certificates issued in time. Defects logged. Claims answered.
Why employer-side.
Contract administration is procedural work. The procedural levers — the Project Manager's certificates, the Engineer's determinations, the Principal Agent's instructions — sit on the employer's side of the table by design. We sit there because that's where the work actually is.
Doing both sides on the same project would compromise the procedural integrity that makes contract administration useful in the first place. So we don't. We don't represent contractors on live projects we administer. We don't switch sides mid-contract. If the work calls for someone in the contractor's seat, we point you to colleagues who do that and don't do this.
House rules.
We administer the contract the way the contract reads — not the way it's commonly run, not the way the project would prefer, not retrospectively after the fact.
- ·Every notice cites the clause it is issued under.
- ·Every compensation event quotation separates the effect on the Prices, the Completion Date and the Key Dates, as Clause 62.2 requires.
- ·Programmes are accepted or rejected against the four reasons in Clause 31.3, not against site-meeting opinion.
- ·Certificates issued in time. Defects logged in time. Claims answered in time, not when prompted.
- ·Where the contract is silent, we say so before we draft a Z-clause or interpretation.
These aren't aspirational statements. They are how we run every contract, on every project.
Three things we do.
Run live contracts as the employer's contract administrator, on retainer.
Sell editable contract templates and worked examples to in-house teams who run their own contracts but want a starting point that doesn't require six weeks of clean-up.
Adapt standard forms to specific projects — Contract Data, Z-clauses, Activity Schedules, Works Information — and hand back a signature-ready contract.
What we are not.
Not a law firm. Not a project management consultancy. Not a quantity surveyor. Not a generalist. We do one thing: administer the construction contract.
What we work on.
Construction and infrastructure projects, anywhere in South Africa.
Public infrastructure: water, sanitation, roads, energy, transport. Vertical building: schools, clinics, government office, mid-rise commercial. Civils packages: bulk earthworks, services, structures.
Smaller works run under JBCC MWA or NEC ECSC3. Larger packages run under NEC ECC3, GCC 2015, or FIDIC. Professional services contracts under PSC3 or PSSC3 where the work is consultancy on the employer's behalf.
Based in Bloemfontein, Free State. Working across South Africa.