TENDER REVIEW
Most subcontractors read the drawings twice and the subcontract once, on the afternoon it's due. A tender review flips that: it reads the commercial terms while you can still qualify them, so the risk you're carrying is priced into the number you submit — or written out of the contract before you sign.
A tender review is a commercial read of the subcontract terms attached to an invitation to tender, done before you submit your price. It is not an estimate and it is not a legal opinion. It answers three questions: what risk is this contract asking me to carry, what does that risk cost, and which parts of it am I going to ask the builder to change?
The timing is the whole point. At tender stage you have leverage: the builder wants your number and hasn't awarded yet, so a qualification costs you nothing but a paragraph. After award, the same request is a favour. Every hour spent on a tender review is bought back at a rate no other contract admin work matches — and on the jobs you don't win, you've lost an hour. On the jobs you do win, you've kept the difference between a priced risk and an unpriced one.
The commercial machinery, not the scope. Payment terms and claim windows. Extension of time and delay-cost provisions, and the notice periods attached to them. Liquidated damages — rate, cap, and how they're triggered. The variation regime: who can direct one, whether a written direction is required, how long you have to notify and price. Retention and security. Indemnities, insurance limits and set-off rights. Termination and suspension. And in every case, the interaction with the Security of Payment Act for the state the work is in.
If you want a starting point you can work down on a Friday afternoon, the 12-point subcontract review checklist covers the clauses that most often cost subcontractors money.
Tendered standard positions — standard positions in SubSync, where you set them once under Settings → Company — are the commercial terms your business has decided it will accept, applied to every tender you price. They are your default answers — the position you tender to, before any negotiation. A liquidated damages cap you won't go above. A payment term you won't go beyond. A minimum notice period for EOTs. A retention percentage and a release trigger. Whether you'll accept a broad-form indemnity, and what you'll do if one appears.
Most subcontractors carry these positions in someone's head — usually the director's — which means the answer changes depending on who reads the contract and how busy they are. Writing them down turns contract review from an argument into a comparison. The estimator no longer needs to judge whether a 15% LD cap is acceptable; they need to check it against the number the business already agreed.
Once your standard positions are recorded, a tender review stops being a reading exercise and becomes a comparison. Every review reads the contract clause by clause against the positions your business already holds, and anything the contract contradicts comes back flagged as a conflict with your tender: where it asks for more than you accept, by how much, and how serious it is. Where you have supplied your tender documents, it also flags scope departures — the qualifications, alternatives, exclusions and assumptions you tendered that the contract quietly does not honour.
That list is more useful than a general risk report, for three reasons. It's short — on a well-drafted subcontract there may be four conflicts, and you can deal with four things. It's specific to your business, so an LD rate that's fine for a $6m formworker and fatal for a $80k tiler doesn't get flagged the same way for both. And it converts straight into a negotiating document: every conflict is already a departure, with your position and your reason attached.
Adopt the conflicts you want to pursue, drop the ones you'll wear on this job, and what's left is the schedule you send back with your price: clause, contract position, departure sought, risk rating. That document is what actually changes the deal — see how to write a departure schedule that gets agreed, and use the blank departure schedule template if you don't have a format already.
SubSync's AI Commercial Reviewer does the reading: upload the tendered subcontract, get every clause risk-rated against typical Australian commercial positions with the industry position beside it, and build the departure schedule from the flags you adopt. Most reviews land in 15–20 minutes, which is the difference between reviewing the contract and reviewing the contract at 4pm on the day it's due.
Upload the subcontract from a live tender and see the risk-rated clauses — no account needed.
