As projects move forward in Rabbet and budget adjustments take place, we have created an easy way to track contingency usage real-time with visual graphs to help you plan for contingency needs throughout the remainder of a project.
To view contingency usage, simply select the desired project, navigate to the contingency usage tile. This will provide you with visualizations of percentage of Total contingency and hard costs contingency that that have been used for the project.
If no contingency line items are set in project settings > Line item settings, Contingency tiles will display the following messages.
Clicking the 'Set Up Contingency' link will navigate you to the line item settings where you can add the contingency category to applicable line items.
Contingency Rules
In addition to tracking contingency usage, Rabbet allows lenders to configure rules that control how and when contingency can be drawn. These rules can be set per project and apply to total contingency, hard cost contingency, and soft cost contingency independently.
To configure contingency rules, navigate to Project Settings > Draw Settings > Contingency.
Minimum Balance
Ensures a floor on how much contingency must remain relative to the remaining budget. When enabled, Rabbet will flag draws that would cause the contingency balance to fall below the specified threshold.
There are three variants:
Total contingency — Remaining total contingency must be greater than or equal to X% of the remaining total budget
Hard cost contingency — Remaining hard cost contingency must be greater than or equal to X% of the remaining hard cost budget
Soft cost contingency — Remaining soft cost contingency must be greater than or equal to X% of the remaining total budget
Pro-Rata Release
Ties contingency availability to overall project completion, preventing contingency from being drawn faster than the project is progressing. A small upfront allowance can be made available immediately at project start; after that is exhausted, the remaining contingency drawn cannot exceed project completion by more than the configured percentage.
There are three variants covering total, hard cost, and soft cost contingency. Each is configured with:
Initial allowance (%) — Percentage of contingency available immediately at project start
Overage buffer (%) — How many percentage points above project completion the contingency exhausted is allowed to reach (e.g., setting this to 10 means contingency drawn can be up to 10% ahead of completion)
Stepped Release
Releases contingency in predefined increments tied to project completion milestones. This gives lenders structured control over when larger portions of contingency become accessible as the project progresses.
Stepped release is configured with:
Upfront Allowance (%) — The percentage of total contingency available immediately at project start, before any milestones are reached
Steps — Each step defines a completion range and the maximum contingency that can be drawn within that range:
Project Complete (Min %) — The minimum project completion percentage for this step to apply (auto-populated based on the prior step's max)
Project Complete (Max %) — The upper bound of the completion range for this step
Max Contingency (%) — The maximum percentage of total contingency that can be drawn once the project reaches this completion range
Additional steps can be added using + Add Step. A typical configuration might look like:
There are three variants: total contingency, hard cost contingency, and soft cost contingency — each configured independently.
For information on project settings, refer to the help article below:
For information on project budget adjustments, refer to the help article below:
Do you have questions or feedback? Please email us at help@rabbet.com.