What actually makes an estimate accurate

Every contractor wants an accurate estimate. Not many can say precisely what makes one accurate, beyond "getting it right", which isn't much use when you're staring at a blank pricing sheet the night before a bid's due. So here's what accuracy actually comes down to.

Quantities measured, not guessed

Accuracy starts before a single rate gets applied. If the quantities underneath the estimate were measured properly off the drawings, item by item to NRM2, the estimate has a real chance of being right. If they were estimated by eye or carried over roughly from a similar job, no amount of careful rate setting fixes that. The rate can be perfect and the quantity wrong, and the price is still wrong.

Rates that reflect current UK costs

The second part is pricing those quantities on rates that reflect what things actually cost now, not what they cost on a job priced a year ago. Material and labour costs move, and a rate carried forward unchanged from an old job quietly erodes the margin on every item it's applied to.

Nothing missed off the drawings

The third part is coverage. An accurate estimate accounts for everything shown on the drawings, not just the obvious big-ticket items. It's the small things, a run of external drainage, a section of making good, an item on a later sheet nobody got to, that tend to go missing when a takeoff's rushed, and they're exactly the things that come straight out of your own price once the job's running.

Why this usually comes down to time, not skill

Most contractors we speak to already know all of this. The reason estimates come in less accurate than they should be almost never comes down to not knowing how to price a job. It comes down to not having the hours in the week to measure every element properly while also running the work that's already on site. That's the gap 25+ years contractor-side experience taught us to close, by taking the measuring off your hands entirely.

Send your drawings. See a sample estimate to see what one built from measured quantities actually looks like, instead of one built on the hours you had left in the week.

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