Produce an NRM1 order of cost estimate

Enter the gross internal floor area, the building type, the quality level and the region. What comes back is a total with an elemental breakdown across substructure, superstructure, finishes, services and external works, and an accuracy band around it rather than one confident figure.

Why: NRM 1 calls the earliest estimate a floor area method estimate for a reason: the area and the building type are the only two things anybody knows properly at this point. Publishing the accuracy band beside the total is what stops a Stage 2 figure being read as a tender sum, which is how a project acquires a budget nobody ever agreed to.

Open the register and put design development risk, construction risk and employer change risk in as separate allowances rather than folding one percentage into the rate. As the design firms up, draw against them and read what is left.

Why: NRM 1 treats risk as a cost plan item with a name and an owner, not as a cushion buried in a rate. Held separately it can be reported, spent and released deliberately. Buried in the rate it is invisible, and the first time anybody goes looking for it is the day it has already gone.

Load a tender price index series of the kind the cost information services publish, set the base period the rates came from and the target period the works will be tendered and built in, and let the adjustment run. A location factor moves a national rate to the region the site is actually in.

Why: A rate taken from a price book or from a finished job is priced at the date that job was tendered, and repeating it unchanged for work three years out is a forecast nobody made on purpose. Rebasing turns the gap into a line the client can see, argue with and sign off, which is the whole point of showing inflation rather than absorbing it.

Generate the basis of estimate and work through the inclusions, exclusions and assumptions it proposes. Say which drawings and which revision the estimate was built from, what sits outside it, and what the client has to decide before the next stage can firm it up.

Why: This estimate will be set against a tender in eighteen months by somebody who was not in the room. Without the basis that comparison is between two numbers and somebody is at fault; with it the comparison is between two scopes, and the difference stops being an accusation and becomes a list.

Produce the cost report for the stage: the elemental summary, the risk allowances, the inflation line and the accuracy band, in one document that is dated and versioned so the next stage has something firm to be measured against.

Why: Reporting cost against the RIBA stage it belongs to is what lets a client watch cost move as design moves, instead of watching one number get replaced by another with no account of why. A stage report that carries its own basis is also the only version of the estimate anybody can safely quote six months later.