Review the commercial position
The Commercial Review tab of the project cockpit: pricing quality across the bill, budget against committed cost by package, supplier concentration, unresolved flags, and the AI settlement brief that reads the whole position back before you commit.
What you'll learn
- Read the pricing quality mix and know how much of the bill rests on a real award
- Find the packages furthest over budget and the supplier holding too many of them
- Clear the unresolved flags: terms exceptions, coverage gaps, consistency findings, rate outliers, stale scoring
- Generate and read a settlement brief before you submit a price to your client
By the time a buy-out is mostly priced, the numbers look finished. Some of them are: awarded packages and your own rates. Some are not: a best bid that could still be withdrawn, a carried price from a round that closed months ago, a section where the low bidder wrote their own terms. The client bill does not distinguish between them. This tab does. Scale
Why this matters
A contractor commits to a client price once. Everything after that is variation management. The moment to find out that a third of the bill rests on unawarded bids, that one subcontractor holds five of nine packages, or that the low MEP bid carries a rate outlier nobody questioned, is before the price goes out, not after. The Commercial Review puts all of that on one screen, in the order a reviewer would ask about it.
Where it is and when it fills
Commercial Review is the third tab of the project cockpit, between Consolidated and Billing History. Until the BoQ has been split it shows Nothing to review yet with a Go to Split button. Once packages exist, the tab carries a badge with the number of unresolved flags across the project; when there are none, there is no badge.
Pricing quality
The first card answers one question: what kind of price is each line resting on? It shows the share of the bill in each source, in the same order the roll-up uses: Self rate, Awarded, Carried, Best bid, and Unpriced. Awarded and self-rated scope is committed. Carried and best-bid scope is a number that can still move. Unpriced scope is a number that does not exist yet.
Beneath the mix, one line names the money you cannot see: N lines have no budget rate: invisible money. A line with no budget cannot show a variance, so a bad price on it never looks wrong anywhere in the cockpit. Add a budget rate on the master for those lines before you trust the totals.
Budget vs. committed, by package
The second card lists every package with its Status, Budget, Committed, and Variance, ranked with the package running furthest over its budget at the top, because that is the one you will have to answer for. Packages with nothing committed yet read Not priced and sort last. A Total row closes the table. These are the same figures as the Consolidated tab's budget card, cut by package instead of by section.
Risks
Two things a reviewer always asks about:
- Supplier concentration: which suppliers hold more than one package on this project, and how many. Concentration is not wrong; a good MEP contractor may deserve three packages. It is a dependency you should know you are taking. When nobody holds more than one package, the card says so.
- Unresolved flags, by package: everything on a package that still needs a human decision. Terms with exceptions or Own terms on a bid (the supplier did not accept your terms as written), N coverage gaps (scope the leading bid does not price), N consistency findings (a bid that contradicts itself), N rate outliers (a rate far from the field), and Stale scoring run (bids changed since the AI last scored them). Each flag is resolved where it originated: on the package's bids and AI Scoring tabs. This card is the list; the badge on the tab is its count.
The settlement brief
Numbers tell you where to look. The Settlement brief tells you what the position means. Generate settlement brief asks the AI to read every package, its winning or leading bid, its terms response, and its flags, and to write two things:
- Weakest points before you submit: the handful of exposures a reviewer would raise first, in plain language.
- The Qualifications register: a table of every qualification a supplier has attached to their price, with Kind (Terms exception, Own terms, Coverage gap, Consistency finding, Rate outlier), Package, Supplier, and a one-line Summary.
A fresh brief costs one AI credit, stated on the card before you generate. Opening a brief you already generated is free, and so is regenerating while nothing has changed; a brief you paid for is never lost to a page reload. The card shows Generated (date), and when the underlying data has moved since then it adds Data changed since this was generated, so you know to Regenerate before relying on it. If the brief cannot fit a very large project it says so honestly rather than truncating in silence.
The settlement brief is a reading of the commercial position, not a recommendation to award. Awards happen on each package, with the AI Scoring decision panel and its "Before you award" checks. See Review bids and AI Scoring.
What good looks like
- Awarded plus self-rated scope covers the whole bill before the client price goes out; best-bid and carried shares are known and accepted deliberately, not discovered later.
- No line is invisible money: every line on the master has a budget rate.
- The over-budget packages at the top of the variance table have a written reason, or a re-tender.
- The unresolved-flag badge reads zero: every terms exception is negotiated or accepted, every outlier questioned, every stale run re-scored.
- A settlement brief is generated after the last award and before the bill is exported, and its weakest points are answered in the client submission.
Next steps
Related guides