How We Turn An Enquiry Into A Submitted Price

The Enquiry Lands, Then What

A tender enquiry comes in with a deadline attached and usually a stack of drawings that need sorting before anything can be priced. The first job isn't pricing, it's working out what you've actually been sent, what's missing, and how much time is left before submission. Get this wrong and you spend the last two days of the tender period chasing information instead of checking the price.

Reading The Job Before Pricing It

Before any rates go in, the scope needs breaking down properly, spatial extent, specification, and anything about the site or existing building that adds complexity. This is where a lot of tenders go wrong, the estimator starts pricing before anyone's actually read the whole set of drawings and flagged the awkward bits.

Measuring What's There

Quantities get taken off measured under NRM2, with wastage and fixing allowances built in rather than added as an afterthought. Anything ambiguous on the drawings gets logged as a query rather than guessed at, because a guess buried inside a rate is impossible to find again once the job is running.

Pricing With Current Information

Rates go against the measured quantities using current subcontractor quotes and current material prices, not whatever was used on the last similar job. Where a package hasn't come back in time, it goes in as a provisional sum with a clear note, not folded into someone else's rate to make the numbers add up.

Checking It Before It Goes Out The Door

Someone who didn't build the price checks it against the drawings and against the enquiry documents before submission. This is where missed items, wrong quantities and duplicated allowances get caught, and it's the step that gets skipped when the deadline is tight, which is exactly when it matters most.

Handing It Over

The submitted price should stand up to questions from the client's QS without the estimator needing to reconstruct how a number was reached from memory. If the breakdown is traceable back to the drawings, that conversation is straightforward.

If you've got an enquiry on your desk right now, Send your drawings. If you want to see how a submission like this is structured, See a sample estimate.

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