Buyout

Buyout is what happens after award: every trade in the estimate has to be bought — a subcontract or purchase order written against a real vendor at a real price. The buyout total against the estimate is the first hard signal of whether the job will make money.

What goes wrong

Scope that nobody owns. It was in the estimate, it was priced, and it never made it into a subcontract because the buyout list was rebuilt by hand in a different file and a line fell off.

What a buyout log tracks

• Each scope item or trade with its estimated amount.
• Who it is assigned to and whether it is contracted or still open.
• The delta between bought and estimated, by line and in total.

In PreConstruct

Awarded scope carries straight from the bid sheet into buyout, so nothing is retyped. Bought and open are tracked by division and the buyout total is watched against the estimate. See Buyout.