BOQ settings

The Settings panel controls how the BOQ behaves and what it shows. Most are personal preferences; three change how the bill protects you and are worth setting deliberately.

The three that matter

Lock Ordered or Billed Items

Stops items being changed once a purchase order or an invoice exists against them.

Turn this on. Editing the quantity on an item you have already ordered against breaks the relationship between what you committed and what you allowed, silently. The discrepancy usually surfaces months later, when the cost-against-budget report stops making sense and nobody can say why.

If you genuinely need to change a locked item, the order against it needs revising too — which is the conversation the lock is forcing you to have.

Alert Price Changes

Flags items whose source price has moved, rather than changing them underneath you.

This is the right behaviour on a live job. You find out that concrete has gone up without your submitted tender quietly changing to match.

Show Actual Costs Columns

Adds committed and actual cost alongside your estimate.

Leave it off while estimating — the columns are empty and take width from the ones you are using. Turn it on the moment the job is won, when allowed versus committed versus spent becomes the thing you want to see.

Display settings

Setting	What it does
Hide Empty Nodes	Suppresses cost centers with nothing in them
Only Included Items	Hides switched-off items
Only Selected WBS	Shows one cost center at a time
Show Archived	Brings archived material into view
WBS tree sorting	Order of the cost center tree
Show Buttons	Which row action buttons appear
Show Job Number on the jobs list	Adds the job code as a column
Open in a new window	Opens dialogs in a separate window
Keep this page open	Stops a dialog closing after each save

Hide Empty Nodes is the one that makes a full standard structure usable on a small job — import your fifteen-trade template onto a bathroom renovation and the eleven empty trades disappear.

Keep this page open is worth ticking whenever you are adding many things in a row. It saves a click per item, which adds up over a hundred items. The Import from Price Lists window has its own tick box for the same thing, Keep this window open to add more — see Importing from a price list.

Recommended setup

While estimating:

Setting
Lock Ordered or Billed Items	On
Alert Price Changes	On
Show Actual Costs Columns	Off
Hide Empty Nodes	On
Only Included Items	Off — you want to see the options you are carrying
Keep this page open	On

Once the job is won:

Setting
Show Actual Costs Columns	On
Only Included Items	On — the options are decided

Everything else stays as it was.

History

The History view shows what changed on an item and when.

It is the answer to “this rate is not what I remember” and to “who changed the quantity?” — questions that come up on any job with more than one person working on it. Worth knowing it is there before you need it.