Knowing what's coming in against what you're paying out, stage by stage

A job can be profitable on paper and still put you under. You're paying subbies and suppliers on their terms while you're waiting on a valuation to clear on yours, and if nobody's mapped out when each of those payments actually lands, you find out you're short at the worst possible moment, usually with a wage bill due that week.

Profitable and solvent aren't the same thing. A tender price only tells you one of them.

Why the gap opens up mid-contract

The trouble is timing, not total. Materials often need paying before the valuation that covers them has even been submitted, let alone certified. Labour goes out weekly whether or not the client's payment cycle keeps pace. If your original estimate was one lump sum with no element breakdown behind it, you've got no way of seeing which stage of the job is going to be the tight one until you're already in it.

What a measured breakdown gives you that a guess can't

An estimate built element by element, to NRM2, isn't just useful for pricing the job. It's useful for staging it. Once you know what each element costs and roughly when it falls in the programme, you can see where the outgoings bunch up against a payment cycle that isn't moving as fast. Substructure and groundworks early, finishes and services later, each with its own cost sitting against the point in the job where you'll actually be paying for it.

Seeing the tight month before it arrives

That's the difference between finding out you're short and knowing it's coming three months out. A properly measured estimate gives you the figures to build that picture, stage against outgoing, rather than a single number that tells you the job's worth doing without telling you when the money actually moves.

Send your drawings and we'll measure the job element by element, so you've got the figures to see where the tight stages sit before you're in them, not after. Send your drawings for a fixed fee quote, agreed before we start. See a sample estimate to see how the breakdown's laid out.

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