The Difference Between a Rough Number and a Proper Price

A ballpark figure is not a tender price

Plenty of prices get put together on the back of a rough take-off and a gut feel for rates. That is fine for talking to a client about roughly what a job might cost. It is not fine when that same number ends up on a tender submission with your name against it. A proper price is built item by item, priced against current rates, with the arithmetic checked before it goes anywhere near a client.

What a proper build up actually includes

A tender price worth submitting is built from a full take-off measured to NRM2, priced against current supplier and labour rates, with preliminaries, overheads and margin added on top rather than guessed at. It should come with a note of what has been included and what has been assumed, so if a client queries a figure you can point to exactly where it came from.

Where amateur pricing goes wrong

The usual failure points are the same ones every time. Quantities lifted from an old job without checking they still apply. Rates that have not been touched since the last price rise. Preliminaries added as a flat percentage instead of being priced against the actual programme and site set up. None of these show up until the job is running and the margin has gone.

Why it is worth getting someone else to build it

Pricing your own work while also running the site, chasing labour and keeping other jobs moving is how corners get cut on the estimate. A second pair of hands on the take-off and pricing, someone whose only job that day is the numbers, tends to catch what gets missed when you are doing it between everything else.

We have spent 25+ years contractor-side building prices this way. Send your drawings over and we will put a proper build up together. See a sample estimate first to see the level of detail you get back.

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