Measure a bill of quantities to NRM2

Open the tender drawings on the measurement canvas, set the scale from a dimension you trust, and measure the areas, lengths and counts each work section needs. Every measurement stays attached to the sheet and the revision it was taken from.

Why: NRM 2 measures net quantities of finished work, so the thing that decides whether a quantity survives a challenge is which drawing it came off and which revision that was. A measurement with no sheet behind it cannot be rechecked when the drawing is reissued, and on a live job the drawing is always reissued.

Open the measured quantities register. It gathers the take-off measurements and the quantities already sitting on the bill into one rollup, grouped by unit, trade or source, with running totals that never mix units.

Why: A rollup by unit is the cheapest error check in measurement. A wall area that came out an order of magnitude wrong is invisible in a list of two hundred measurements and obvious in a total, and looking costs nothing while the rates are still off.

Write each bill item as NRM 2 asks for it, a description that identifies the work, the unit of measurement and the measured quantity, and price it from the cost catalogue or from your own rates. Then classify the items: pick NRM as the standard and the picker offers the cost groups, from facilitating works and substructure through superstructure, internal finishes and services to external works.

Why: Classification is what makes one bill comparable with another bill and with the cost plan the job started from. A bill organised in whatever order the measurer happened to work in prices perfectly well and benchmarks against nothing, and putting the items into the same groups the estimate used is what lets somebody answer why this job came in above the last one.

Put the defined and undefined provisional sums and the prime cost sums onto the register as their own entries, each with its amount and what it is meant to cover. As the work is instructed and valued, draw against them and watch the remainder.

Why: A provisional sum folded into a rate is a sum nobody can release, and an undefined one that a tenderer has quietly priced as though it were defined is an argument booked in for the first valuation. Held on the register both parties can see them, and the contract sum adjustment at the end becomes arithmetic rather than archaeology.

Build the preliminaries out of the site establishment, site staff, temporary works, standing plant and welfare the job actually needs, splitting the time-related items from the fixed ones. The time-related lines follow the programme, so a longer job costs more here without anybody rewriting a rate.

Why: Preliminaries are work section 1 of NRM 2 and they are also the section most often carried as a percentage of everything else. A percentage cannot answer the one question that matters when the programme slips, which is what a further six weeks on site costs, and a properly built prelims section answers it in a minute.

Run the bill through validation to catch the item left at zero, the quantity that no longer ties to the rollup, the unit that contradicts its own description and the section that got missed. Fix what it finds and run it again until it comes back clean.

Why: A bill goes to several tenderers at once and every one of them prices the same mistake. An item with no quantity comes back priced six different ways, and the levelling that follows is then an argument about your own bill rather than about their offers.