Keeping rates current

A price list is only worth what its rates are worth. Keeping them current is what separates a useful list from a stale one that makes estimates confidently wrong.

Refreshing rates

From the BOQ’s Items menu:

Command	What it does
Renew prices	Updates the selected items from their linked source
Renew all below prices	Updates everything below the current point
Renew all the products of this costing	Refreshes the whole costing
Alert Price Changes	Flags items whose source price has moved

Alert Price Changes is the setting to have on. It tells you a rate has moved rather than changing it underneath you, so you decide whether to take the new price.

Never renew prices on a submitted tender

Refreshing rates on a costing you have already quoted changes what the job says it costs, and your submitted price no longer matches your bill. If you want to see what current rates would do, duplicate the costing and update the copy.

Only linked items update

Items carrying a Link to Pricelist are the ones a refresh can reach. Rates typed by hand are invisible to every refresh, forever.

That is the practical argument for building estimates from the price list rather than typing: not the speed, but the fact that typed rates never get updated again.

Where updated rates come from

Supplier schedules. Most suppliers issue updated rates periodically. Update the list when they arrive rather than filing them.

Tender results. A trade you tendered three times this year has three real market prices. That is better information than any published rate.

Your own actual costs. The most valuable source, and the one nobody uses.

Your own price on a SmarteBuild item

Items and products supplied with SmarteBuild are read-only — you cannot change their price. You can, however, record your own price for one, and that is the price you see and the price a BOQ import uses, without the shared item changing for anyone else.

Click the item and open the drawer’s Prices tab. It shows the SmarteBuild price, lets you enter yours with Set (tick inc GST inside the price box if the figure you typed includes GST), and keeps a history of every price you have set, with who set it and from when. The My price set filter chip lists every item you have done this on, and the grid shows the price that applies to you with a “Yours” mark where it is your own.

• From defaults to today. Set a future date to schedule a change — it shows in the list as pending and takes effect on that day.
• Remove a price to fall back to the one before it, or to the SmarteBuild price if there is none.
• Your price applies to your whole company group, not just the user who set it.

The same tab appears on your own items and on products, where it is simply a direct view of the price history that editing the price already writes. A dot on the tab means you have a price of your own on that row.

Existing estimates keep the price they were built with

Your price reaches new imports into a BOQ. Items already sitting in an estimate are not changed, and the “prices have moved” prompt still compares against the SmarteBuild price.

Using your own cost history

You have the data. Every finished job holds allowed, committed and actual cost per item — see Cost to date against budget.

A trade that ran over on three jobs running is not bad luck. It is a rate that needs changing.

Worked example

Three completed jobs, concrete slab items:

Job	Allowed	Actual	Variance
18 Beach Road	$8,154	$8,612	+5.6%
42 Ridge Street	$11,400	$12,090	+6.1%
Lot 118 Aspen	$9,800	$10,240	+4.5%

Consistently 5% light. That is not three unlucky pours — the rate is wrong, or the allowance for waiting time and part-loads is missing.

Raise the concrete rate about 5%, or add a line for the extras. Either way the next estimate is right, and it was your own jobs that told you.

A review routine

Once a quarter:

1. Update from any supplier schedules received.
2. Look at completed jobs for trades that consistently ran over.
3. Adjust those rates.
4. Check the rates you use most — the top twenty by frequency.
5. Note in each entry when you checked it.

An hour, four times a year.

Note when a rate was checked

In the entry’s Note:

Checked Feb 2026 against Barwon schedule. Includes pump for pours over 15m³.

Six months later, that answers whether the rate is current and what it covers. A rate with no date is one nobody trusts and everybody re-checks.

Rates that should not be refreshed

Some should stay fixed:

• A rate from a quote you accepted — that is the agreed price, not a list price
• A rate you deliberately adjusted for a job’s particular circumstances
• Anything on a costing you have submitted

Where you have adjusted a rate on purpose, note why on the item. Otherwise someone refreshing the costing later will helpfully undo your decision.