10 Essential Construction Documents for Every Building Project in 2024 

Keen to avoid construction project failure?

Then creating a great document management strategy should be a top priority.

When you don’t have the right construction documents, it’s extremely easy for your project to fall short of quality, timeline and financial expectations. 

A Logikal study discovered that 38% of construction projects in North America are unsuccessful. That’s because they fail to meet cost, quality and timeline objectives.

In order to improve the success of your project, you need to have important documents for construction like architectural plans, bidding records and others. These can help you keep track of important goals and mitigate various construction risks.

With clear documentation, you can also enhance productivity to accelerate completion and ensure the right standards of materials are used to deliver high-quality projects. 

If you’d like to learn about other essential information for companies, check out this article I wrote about important documents for small businesses to prioritize.

In this article, we’ll discuss essential construction documents for every building project in 2024 so that you can improve project quality and client satisfaction. 

Let’s get started. 

1. Bidding documents

What is a bidding document in construction? 

Bidding documents refer to paperwork that you provide to project owners, highlighting details such as your qualifications and expertise, which can help you win the work. 

With the contractor selection process usually very competitive, having the right bidding documents in place is crucial to standing out from the crowd. 

Unfortunately, at least 22.7% of construction companies expect increased competition, according to a survey by Statista. So things will get even tougher in the coming months, and you have to take every step to give yourself a fighting chance. 

One way to differentiate your business is through well-drafted bidding proposals that help you win projects. 

That said, there are different types of important documents for construction bidding. 

The first includes an invitation to bid document, which is typically made by the project owner, encouraging contributors to submit their bid proposals for the work. 

From the project description and scope of work to evaluation criteria and more, this document will typically contain all the project requirements. It will also define what documents you’ll need to provide to make your bid legitimate for consideration. 

As a contractor, you’ll need to submit a bid proposal document, which will contain important information about the terms and conditions, the timeline or schedule of the project and your experiences and expertise, among other vital details. 

2. Architectural drawings

Architectural drawings are vital for visualizing the concept. 

They bring a building idea to life, enabling you to draft a coherent proposal or plan for implementing the project and communicate its goals and merits to stakeholders. 

With well-drafted architectural drawings, you can provide a framework to guide construction activities at every step to reduce the risk of errors and reworks. 

A study by XYZ revealed that 75% of construction firms encounter reworks at least two times every week. The worst part is that it costs some of these companies upto 20% of the initial value of the project. 

An excellent architectural drawing is key to lowering these numbers, and working without one is like building while blind-folded. 

That said, digitizing your architectural drawings is important for making them easily sharable and changeable according to your project’s evolving needs. 

While you may already have a CAD platform for this purpose, I also recommend considering a document management solution that offers secure file-sharing mediums. You’ll get additional features for holistic document management to augment CAD tools.

Click here to start your free FileCenter trial to digitize CAD documents. 

With our software, you get advanced OCR scanning features for digitizing architectural drawings to make them searchable. It also enforces strict version control to streamline collaboration, and has dedicated portals for sharing these files with project owners.

3. Bill of quantities

What is a bill of quantities or BOQ in construction?

A bill of quantities is a document that shows the total costs and amount of materials required to complete a project. It’s one of the most important documents for construction because it improves transparency. 

Without a bill of quantities document, you can easily underquote the project’s total expenditure, which can lead to lower profit margins & budget overruns. 

In fact, a study by McKinsey found out that 98% of construction projects face cost overruns. Some of these projects exceed initial estimates by 30%, thereby massively constricting profit margins. 

An excellent bill of quantities document is the first step toward addressing these situations. 

One option you could explore when creating your bill of quantities is to use a spreadsheet, and then draft all the different fields and data from scratch. But this entails a lot of manual data entry and form creation. 

Fortunately, you can also use a document management software to create a template and then adjust quantities and materials according to each project’s unique needs. 

It’s important to point out that each construction project is different, so the bill of quantities may vary drastically from one project to the next. 

However, the purpose of the BOQ still remains the same, and that’s to provide measured quantities and costs of the total number of materials you’ll use. 

4. Construction agreement 

Construction agreements also impact project success. 

These documents essentially define and formalize engagements between project owners and contractors, and assign tasks and responsibilities to either party. 

The lack of an effective construction agreement increases project risks, while it can also lead to expensive disputes that stall construction projects. 

An Arcadis study brought to light that 30.1 million dollars is lost annually to construction disputes in North America. Aside from being very costly, these disputes also took too long to resolve, with the average length being over 16 months. 

This is the reason why I’ve included agreements in our list of important documents for construction because they enable timely and effective dispute resolution.

So how do you write a construction agreement for your project?  

This is an important part of legal document management and you should start by defining the objective with regard to the type of project. It must also describe completion dates, project location and all the parties involved. 

Other elements to include are clauses that describe the terms and conditions of the project. These entail claim resolving, dispute resolving, construct sum amount, and payment terms clauses, which can help protect your interests as a contractor. 

Another vital must-have attribute is a stipulation for how all parties are to handle any contract changes, which is essentially to accommodate evolving project requirements.

5. General conditions document 

Why is a general conditions document necessary? 

Commonly abbreviated as GCs, this document defines the conditions and contract terms that govern the project and the relationships between different parties.

By also setting forth conditions about the workmanship and material, the general conditions document greatly reduces the risk of low-quality, end products.

It’s very alarming to note that 80% of construction projects experienced poor quality issues in 2022, according to a study by Emerald Insight. The worst part is that these incidents greatly increased the cost of the project. 

Upon further investigation, I found out that a good number of these problems arose from a lack of well-defined requirements about processes and materials. 

With a general conditions document, you can describe what types and quality of materials you’d like contractors & subcontractors to use, thereby improving quality assurance. 

It’s also vital to take note of the fact that a GCs document also addresses other indirect costs, procedures and operations that may not be directly related to construction.

It can document other support activities and requirements for your project such as insurance and bonding requirements, and addressing regulations and site management. So it can help improve regulatory compliance for your business. 

Overall, the GCs can help to improve clarity and consistency during construction, which not only facilitates compliance but also provides legal protection for your project. 

6. Scope of work document

A Scope of Work (SOW) is another vital document. 

It essentially elaborates on what tasks you need to perform as a constructor, and may even go ahead to provide information about processes, work results, and other activities generally involved in your construction project. 

That said, the scope of work documents is the foundation of any successful construction project and, without it, the risk of scope creep increases. 

A study by PMI revealed that 52% of construction projects experience incidents of scope creep. One contributing factor is the poor definition of the extent of the initiative, which may result in you spending more time and funds than initially anticipated.

So how do you create a SOW document for construction? 

You should purpose to include a statement or description that summarizes the project, which entails detailing the main objectives of the construction work. 

It is also important to define the project timeline activities during different phases

For this part, I recommend using the best DocuPhase DMS alternatives to create a Gantt chart or some other visualization of your data. This makes it much simpler to monitor dependencies, deliverables and other project details more accurately. 

A great SOW document should also describe team members, the location of the project, and more important project exclusions to avoid cost and timeline overruns. 

7. Construction schedule

Want to finish construction projects on time? 

If you’d like to hit your project milestones and avoid letting down clients, a construction schedule ranks among important documents for construction that you should create and consistently adhere to. 

Given that construction projects involve many different moving parts, a poor line of sight on activities and deadlines can result in huge delays for your project. 

A survey by AlignOps established that 33% of construction businesses struggle with time tracking, making it the second top-most challenge in the industry. This emphasizes the need for a formal way to schedule and track construction activities.

And that’s where an excellent schedule document comes in to establish order.

But your construction schedule isn’t just about listing tasks and deadlines alone. 

It should provide a detailed breakdown of key aspects such as task management, resource allocation and budgeting. With these documents often getting very complex, I recommend using an excellent document management solution to boost efficiency. 

Click to schedule your demo with FileCenter to learn more about our platform. 

We’ll discuss how to use important features like OCR scanning and PDF annotation, which can lower your data entry burden, and improve your productivity. 

You’ll also learn about other cloud-based document management features that streamline the sharing and co-editing of construction schedules and other documents.

8. Change order documents 

Change is sometimes unavoidable during construction. 

Sometimes, the client may have a change of heart regarding their vision for the project, or other uncontrollable factors like new government building codes may also crop up. 

Change order documents are necessary in order to accommodate unexpected changes on the fly and get around roadblocks that can derail the project. 

A survey by Statista identified that 19.7% of US home builders face challenges arising from client selection decisions and changes. This made it the top most challenge by construction businesses in this niche after competition. 

So you need to create a document strategy for handling changes, just in case your project’s requirements change haphazardly. 

With your change order document, you can define processes and procedures to follow in case the need arises to make one or more changes to the project. This creates an official  and efficient way to document and prose changes during construction. 

In light of this, I recommend using the best M-Files DMS alternatives to digitize these files and create a template that you can customize to accommodate each change order.

When creating these documents, it’s also very crucial to include the original contract number, covering the initial construction agreement to avoid confusion and ambiguities. It’s also prudent to create change order series numbers to track all project changes.

9. Insurance documentation 

Why is insurance documentation crucial during construction? 

From construction workers brushing shoulders with heavy machinery to flammable or hazardous materials, construction is fraught with various risks and variables.

The lack of comprehensive insurance can therefore lead to you being held legally and financially liable for on-site worker injuries and property damages. 

Unfortunately, 197,300 on-site worker injuries occur every year, going by an OSHA study. These caused huge downtimes for some construction companies, resulting from legal and compliance investigations, with other projects even stopping entirely.

It’s very clear that insurance documentation, and a great policy at large, are instrumental for the success of your building project. 

With insurance, you can push the liabilities associated with various risk events, including theft, natural disasters and vandalism, to a third party.

So these are very important documents for construction, and they come in different varieties. They include a worker’s compensation insurance document that addresses lost wages and medical expenses for any workers that get injured on the job. 

Other policies also include builders’ risk insurance documents, which cover properties and provide protection against incidents such as vandalism, theft and damage. 

Some insurance policies may cover all these risks under one policy, and, in this case, you may only have one insurance document compared to several files for each cover.

10. Daily construction reports 

What is a daily construction report exactly? 

Daily construction reports are documents that describe the progress of the project, recording important details about each work day and important on-site events. 

Skipping the creation of daily construction logs can make it difficult to provide clear feedback to clients, and identify theft and other accountability issues.

A survey by PwC revealed that 72% of clients want daily feedback from companies. They’d like you to provide important progress reports every day for their piece of mind, with it a very important criterion when choosing contractors. 

In light of this, daily reports are one of the most important documents for construction if you’d like to improve client satisfaction. 

Creating construction reports everyday can be such a cumbersome affair but digital technologies can make life easier.

With the best document management software for small businesses, you can automate recurring tasks and focus on delivering high-quality end products. Our software, for instance, lets you automate file naming, conversion & routing to amplify productivity

That being said, your daily construction reports should cover key events that occur at the construction site every day. This includes workers on site, what these workers did, materials used, and weather conditions, among other important information. 

By creating daily reports, you’ll be able to keep project owners informed of the building’s progress and even streamline collaboration among your construction workers.

Conclusion

Your project may generate lots of paperwork. 

From bidding documents to bills of quantities, there are several files you need to create and update frequently. 

However, iterative document work can occur at the expense of direct labor time, resulting in huge productivity losses for your construction company. 

A survey by YouGov revealed that 91 annual labor hours for construction workers are lost to paperwork alone. That’s time that you could channel into delivering quality work and meeting your deadlines. 

So it’s important to create an efficient system for managing important construction documents to avoid this becoming a big distraction for your construction business. In particular, I recommend using a paperless document management solution. 

Click here to start your free FileCenter trial to improve productivity and increase success for your construction projects. 

With our software, you can automate various document management tasks and even create standardized document templates and workflows for improving efficiency.