My Project Estimating · Cost Planning
Pricing the job was the easy part. The real test is three months in, when half the trades are on site, three things have changed since the tender, and you're trying to work out whether you're still inside the number you gave the client. Most contractors find out they're not, and they find out too late to do anything about it.
A budget priced at tender and never looked at again is only accurate on the day it was written. Every variation, every changed spec, every item that turns out different on site chips away at it, and if nobody's tracking those changes against the original breakdown, they all land at once at the final account, as one big unpleasant number instead of a series of small ones you could have managed.
The only way to know where you stand is to keep the budget live, checking actual cost against the original priced item, not the total. If the groundworks line was priced at a set figure and the ground's turned out different, you need to know that the day it happens, not the day you reconcile the account. That only works if the original breakdown was measured properly in the first place, to NRM2, with every element on its own line.
Send your drawings and we build that breakdown before the job starts, item by item, so you've got a proper baseline to run the job against, not just a total to hit. When something changes on site, you can see immediately which line it hits and price the variation against real numbers, instead of guessing at the impact and hoping it works out at the end.
A job you can actually manage as it runs, not just a price you handed over at the start and hoped would hold. You know where the money's going, you know where it's tight, and you're not finding out the true position of the job on the last day of the contract.
Send your drawings and we'll turn them into a client-ready estimate. See a sample estimate to see exactly what you'd be working from.
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