Estimating and bills of quantities
Bills that price themselves from your library
Quantities arrive from takeoff, rates resolve from a versioned cost library, and the bill assembles on the NRM2 hierarchy — with overheads, profit and every build-up visible rather than buried in a spreadsheet cell someone forgot about.
The bill
Built for scrutiny
NRM2 structure built in
Bills organise on the NRM2 work section hierarchy, or NRM3 for cost planning, with sub-tree totals that reconcile at every level rather than only at the bottom.
Cost build-ups
Break any rate into labour, plant and materials, with formula support. The build-up travels with the line, so a queried rate is answered in seconds rather than reconstructed.
Overheads and profit where you need them
Apply them at line, section or project level, with the arithmetic visible. A client's surveyor can follow how the number was reached.
Inclusive or exclusive rates
Print rates with overheads and profit folded in or shown separately, depending on what the job and the client expect to see.
Versioning and issue locking
Save versions as the estimate develops, then issue and lock it. Later changes happen on a new version; the number your client saw is preserved exactly.
Schedules of works
Where a full bill is not the right instrument, produce a schedule of works on JCT or NEC templates with the same pricing engine underneath.
The library
A cost database estimators can start with
Not every firm arrives with a curated rate library, and the ones that do should not have to abandon it.
Industry defaults to start from
A new workspace is seeded with its own starter library aligned to the NRM2 work section classification — the section structure, sub-categories for the major trades, and around seventy indicative work items you reprice to your market.
A library your firm owns
Override any maintained rate with your own, import your existing library from a spreadsheet, and keep both. Overrides, versions and imports are all recorded.
Regional adjustment
Rates carry regional factors, so a London bill and a Newcastle bill draw on the same library without hand-editing every line.
Every rate versioned
Changing a rate creates a new version and leaves the old one attached to every estimate that used it. An issued tender never silently reprices itself.
AI assistance
First drafts, never final figures
The assistant proposes bill lines that fit what you have measured, and suggests a unit rate with its confidence shown when your library has nothing to resolve against. Both arrive as suggestions. Neither reaches a priced bill until an estimator accepts it, and the estimator's name is what stays against the number.
Arithmetic
Decimal discipline, because reconciliation matters
Every monetary value and quantity is stored and computed as an exact decimal, never as a floating-point approximation. When a client's surveyor re-adds your bill by hand, it adds up — to the penny, at every subtotal, on every page. That is not a technical detail; it is the difference between a professional document and one that invites an argument.
Next: the contract phase
Variations, valuations, final accounts and programme tracking all continue from the same numbers, with the same provenance attached.