Design Prelims on an Activity Schedule

I am currently working on a contract with NEC4 opt A & currently producing the activity schedule for the project.

We are responsible for the stage 4ii/4iii design portion of the works and are using a Sub Contractor to develop the design, and the client is not accepting how the Activity schedule has been made to show the design costs.

What made most sense to me was to break the total design costs and spread the people (man hours) across the months, similar to as you would with on site prelims, however the client has not accepted this requesting that the costs should be aligned with specific activities which isn’t always practical for off-site design activities.

What is the best way to break down design development costs into an activity schedule, as it is diffcult to maintain cash flow & claim ongoing progress when there is a lot of off-site people/time being spent when the final deliverable i.e “submission of drawings” is at the end of the process.

@ExcelGuru welcome to the community. The only thing that comes to my mind is breaking down your design activities as much as possible so that your client understands what it is paying for (I guess that is the issue here), with the “drawing submission” being the last activity.

Easier said than done, because you would need to find a way of somehow demonstrating the 100% completion of each of those intermediate stages/activities.

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