Construction projects can be a tornado of documents: contracts, plans, invoices, notices, pay apps, waivers, change orders, and more. There are documents used in the payment process, at the jobsite, and back in the office too. The schedule of values (SOV) is one of those documents that touches everyone from the project manager to the accountant.
At its most simple, a schedule of values is a start-to-finish list of work items on a project that represent the entire project from beginning to end and the entire contract price. The work items are broken down into their component parts with their corresponding values. According to the standard AIA documents, “The schedule of values shall allocate the entire contract sum among the various portions of the work.”
The schedule of values can have significant influence over the project — tying the “value on paper” of the total work on the project (both the work that’s been completed and the work still to be done), to the actual progress made on the work at the jobsite itself. So it’s worthwhile for every participant to have an understanding of what the Schedule of Values entails.
In practice, the granularity by which the schedule of values must be broken down can vary. On some jobs, the requirement of the owner and architect might be that every item must be broken down into increments of less than $20,000 as separate line items. On other projects the value threshold may be more or less – there is no single, industry-wide accepted value threshold.