The rushed tender always misses the same things. Here's where they hide

You've got three days to turn a tender around instead of the two weeks it deserves. You price the obvious stuff fast and move on. The job gets won. Then, on site, the gaps show up, and they're always the same kind of gap.

Preliminaries get squeezed first

When time's short, preliminaries are the first thing to get a rough number instead of a real one. Welfare, access, the scaffold duration, supervision for the length of the actual programme rather than a guess at it. Underprice this and it's not a one-off item you're short on, it's every week the job runs.

Provisional sums get left as a placeholder and forgotten

A provisional sum for something not yet finalised is normal. What's not normal is leaving it as a round figure nobody's actually thought about, then finding out later it was nowhere near enough to cover what it turned out to be. A provisional sum should still be a considered figure, not a number written in to make the page add up.

The work between trades falls through the middle

Builder's work in connection with the services. Making good after another trade's first fix. The bits that aren't clearly one trade's job, so in a rush nobody prices them at all. On a properly measured job these get picked up because the whole thing is measured as one job, not stitched together from whichever trade got round to pricing their bit first.

Measure it properly and the gaps close

None of this is about any one estimator being careless. It's what happens under time pressure, every time. The fix is the same regardless of the deadline: measure the whole job off the drawings, to NRM2, so preliminaries, provisional sums and the work between trades all get a real number rather than a rushed one.

We measure every job this way and hand you back a bill of quantities you can check line by line before it goes into your bid.

Send your drawings and we'll measure the whole job properly, however tight the deadline. See a sample estimate to see exactly what's included.

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