Read a FIEBDC-3 presupuesto somebody sent you

Save the BC3 exactly as it arrived into the project files, next to the invitation and the terms it came with. Do not rename it and do not open it in an editor first, because a save from the wrong tool rewrites the encoding and the accents in the partida texts go with it.

Why: Presupuestos get reissued, sometimes twice in a week, and the question that arrives later is always which version you priced. A filed original answers it in one click. It also gives you something to compare against when the second file lands and nobody says what changed.

Import the BC3. Capitulos arrive as sections and partidas as positions, each with its concept code, its unit, the unit rate the sender carried and the measured total. The extended texts fill in the long descriptions, and the encoding is detected rather than assumed, so a file written in the Windows charset that market still uses reads correctly.

Why: Retyping a presupuesto of six hundred partidas is where a transposed quantity and a dropped line get in, and neither shows up until somebody prices them. Importing keeps your answer tied to the codes and the wording the sender issued, which is also what lets you hand a priced file back rather than a spreadsheet.

Run the bill through validation. The FIEBDC-3 rules ask two things of every position: that it kept a concept code at all, and that the code has a shape the format accepts, which rules out a stray space, a leading dot and the control characters a spreadsheet round trip leaves behind.

Why: A position that lost its code prices perfectly well and then cannot be exported back to BC3 without losing the reference the sender uses to find it. That is discovered on the afternoon of the deadline, when the file will not open on their side and nobody can tell you which of six hundred lines is at fault.

The import reads the decomposition records only far enough to tell an auxiliary resource apart from a real partida, so what you have is a rate without the mano de obra, materiales and maquinaria under it. Pick the partidas that carry your risk and build each one as an assembly with its own rendimientos and resource rates.

Why: The sender's unit rate tells you what they expect to pay, not what the work costs you. Rebuilding the twenty partidas that hold most of the money is a morning's work and it is the only version of the number you can argue for afterwards, whether the argument is a baja to justify or a modificado to price.

Record the assumptions the file forced on you. The measurement lines behind each total do not survive the import, so every quantity you did not re-measure yourself is a quantity you accepted from the sender, and that belongs in writing rather than in somebody's memory.

Why: A quantity accepted without comment becomes a quantity you warranted. Naming the ones you took as given costs a paragraph now and is the difference between a re-measure and an argument when the work on site turns out to be a third more than the partida said.