Construction Contract Components

The MacNail project management software builds a contract document by assembling four different types of components.

* Headers are text documents that are placed at the beginning of a contract. They can spell out conditions of work, terms of payment, and any other 'boiler plate' legal language that you'd like to include (see pages 24-26).
* Stock Clauses are simple contract clauses that can be added anywhere in a contract. Some of them use specific project information such as the bid amount and the name of the client (see pages 105-109).
* Specifications are detailed descriptions of each piece of work that goes into a project. They are assembled into plain English-language sentences, using information from the Specifications portion of an estimate (see pages 34-37).
* Footers are identical to Headers, but they are placed at the end of the contract document (see pages 24-26).

A contract may consist of any or all of these components, depending on the exact purpose for which it will be used.

NOTE: For a diagram of contract components, see page 32.

Types of Output Files

The MacNail construction management software lets you create a Spec Writer contract in either of two forms:
* As a text document that you can open, format and print from any word processor program (see pages 80-87).
* As a spreadsheet document that you can open, format and print from Excel (see pages 88-95).

In either case, you can format the contract any way you'd like before you print it, or you can copy and paste its text into some other program.