When your groundworker's rate and your bricklayer's rate don't add up, the tender's already broken

You price the groundworks yourself on a Monday. Your quantity surveyor prices the superstructure on a Wednesday. Your subcontractor prices the M&E whenever it suits him. By the time it's all stitched together into one tender, nobody's checked whether the rates actually sit together sensibly. One trade's preliminaries are generous, another's are bare bones. One package includes waste and access, another assumes it's included elsewhere.

Nobody spotted it because nobody looked at the whole thing side by side. The client doesn't see the inconsistency either, until the job's running and one trade is haemorrhaging money while another is coining it.

Pricing built in pieces rarely agrees with itself

This isn't about any one person pricing badly. It's what happens when a tender gets built up in separate chunks, by separate people, on separate days, with no single measure holding it all together. Each piece can look fine on its own. Put next to the others, the assumptions don't match.

Measure the whole job to one standard

The fix is to measure the entire job to a single standard, in one pass, so every trade's quantities and rates come from the same basis. We measure the whole job to NRM2, so groundworks, structure, finishes and every trade in between are quantified the same way, at the same level of detail, with the same assumptions about what's included and what isn't.

That means when you look down your bill of quantities, the preliminaries allowance for one trade isn't wildly out of step with another, and nothing's been priced twice, or missed because two people each assumed the other had it.

A tender that holds together under scrutiny

A client, or a main contractor above you, can pull any line in a bill built this way and it makes sense next to the line above and below it. That consistency is what stops a tender falling apart the moment someone starts asking questions.

Send your drawings and we'll measure the whole job to NRM2 in one pass. See a sample estimate to see what a consistent bill of quantities actually looks like.

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