A construction site risk register pricing five risks where every mitigation pays for itself, plus the exposure left for the contingency line. Free template.
Five site risks where every mitigation pays for itself, which sounds like the easy case until you look at what is still sitting there afterwards. The residual total is the number that belongs in the contingency line.
Construction Intermediate Risk Register Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Could Go Wrong on Site?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Exposure today
- $305,000 five risks on a $7.2M build
- After mitigation
- $131,400 the number the contingency has to carry
- The buy-down
- $115,000 spent to remove $173,600 of exposure
- Best line
- +$32,600 net value of the $18,000 utility survey
Five site risks on a $7.2M build. Total expected exposure comes back at $305,000, led by the steel slip at $78,000 and the unrecorded services at $77,000. Every one of the five mitigations has a positive net value, which is unusual for a register and makes this the clean case: the utility survey clears $32,600 for $18,000, the payment bond clears $11,000 for $22,000, the temporary roof clears $9,000 for $26,000, the early steel order clears $4,000 for $35,000 and the design freeze gate clears $2,000 for $14,000.
Do all five and you spend $115,000 to remove $173,600 of exposure. So far so straightforward. The number that matters is the one underneath: residual exposure after every mitigation is still $131,400. That is what the contingency has to carry, and it is the honest answer to the question the commercial meeting is really asking. Mitigating a register does not empty it.
It buys down the part of it that is buyable, and the remainder is a cost you are holding whether or not anybody has written it down. Take the $131,400 and read it against the contingency you have actually priced into the bid; if the bid carries less than that, the register you just built has told you the job is under-provided before a spade has gone in the ground.
Note the ranking once more. The survey is fourth on cost and first on net value by a wide margin, because it makes the largest probability cut on the sheet, from 35% down to 12%. The temporary roof cannot: it halves what bad weather costs and changes the chance of bad weather not at all. Finding out what is under the ground before you dig is less a risk mitigation than a refusal to guess, and it is almost always the best line on a site register.
Second run: clear the three mitigation figures on the steel line, which is what happens when the fabricator will not commit a slot, and rerun. Residual exposure climbs to $170,400, and that $39,000 is what the fabricator conversation is worth, in the contingency line rather than in the argument. To adapt it, put your own five site risks in, price the impacts from your own variation history rather than as a percentage of contract value, and take the residual total straight into the contingency template to see how often a contingency of that size survives.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Site Risks, carrying these columns:
- Risk
- Probability
- Impact ($ if it happens)
- Mitigated prob
- Mitigated impact ($ if it happens)
- Mitigation cost
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Which matters more, your markup or your prep time?What Makes Us Win a Bid?
- What is one more person on the gang worth?What Explains How Much a Crew Gets Done?
- Are you paying for machine days you never use?Which Plant Do We Hire and Which Do We Own?
- Which tenders should you not price at all?Score the Sites Before You Bid
- Do rain days really cost you money?What Moves With Cost on This Job?
- Is one estimator quietly pricing higher than the other?Do Our Two Estimators Price the Same Job the Same Way?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Schedule risk analysis.