Estimating & costing
Check an estimate before you send it
Put a priced bill through the validation rules, clear every warning and error, then export…
3 steps8 minOpen
Cases / Estimating & costing
Estimating & costing
Build a comprehensive unit rate under GB 50500
Take a coded item on a bill of quantities, put your own labour, material and plant behind it, add the management fee and the profit, and read back a comprehensive unit rate whose parts add up to the number on the line.
How it works, step by step
5 steps across the platform - what you do at each one, and why it matters.
1
Open the coded bill and pick the item
BOQOpen the bill, find the section and the item you are pricing, and read the item description and its code before you price anything. The code tells you which schedule item this is; the description tells you what the rate has to cover.
Why: Under GB 50500 the item description is the ground for what the rate includes, and most final-account arguments start with an item whose description did not say enough. Reading it before you price is the cheapest minute in the whole exercise.
InBill of quantitiesGB 50500 item codesOutThe item you are pricing
2
Hold your labour, material and plant rates in one place
Resource CatalogPut the prices you actually buy at into the resource catalog: wage costs by trade, material prices by supplier, plant by the hour. Keep them current rather than accurate once a year.
Why: The rates a contractor is judged on are the firm's own, and a published average is a starting point rather than an answer. Holding them centrally means the next hundred rates you build are consistent with this one, and a price change is one edit instead of a hunt through old bids.
InYour own supplier pricesCrew and plant costsOutMaintained resource rates
3
Compose the rate and read the analysis back
BOQEnter the labour, material and plant the item consumes per unit, then open the rate analysis on the line. It shows the direct cost per unit, the management fee, the profit, the comprehensive unit rate and the item total, in that order.
Why: That sequence is the composition GB 50500 defines, and seeing it as a chain rather than as a total is what lets you answer a client who asks why the rate is what it is. The fee and the profit are taken on the direct cost, so the measure items, the statutory charges and the tax stay where they belong, on the bill total, instead of inflating a rate from the inside.
InThe coded itemLabour, material and plant ratesOutDirect cost per unitComprehensive unit rate
4
Validate before the bill leaves your desk
ValidationRun the bill through validation. For a project in China the GB 50500 rules are selected for you: every item has to carry a code, and the code has to be well formed at nine or twelve digits.
Why: One item left at zero can carry a loss all the way to site, and a malformed code is the sort of thing an owner's reviewer finds before you do. The check is on the shape of the code rather than on its membership in the national schedule, so treat a clean run as a floor and still read the codes yourself.
InPriced billOutValidation reportItems left at zero
5
Issue the priced bill with its working behind it
ReportsReport the priced bill, and keep the rate analysis for the items that carry real money. The analysis is the document you bring to a rate query, not something you rebuild when one arrives.
Why: A rate you can take apart in a meeting settles a query in ten minutes. A rate that exists only as a total turns the same query into a week of reconstruction, and every reconstruction after the event looks like an argument rather than a record.
InValidated priced billOutPriced bill for issueRate analysis behind each item
