The Bill of Quantities explained

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The Bill of Quantities is the priced estimate. It is also the spine of everything that happens after the estimate — purchase orders, progress claims, variations and expenses all read from it.

Understanding the BOQ properly is worth the time even if somebody else builds it, because almost every downstream question turns out to be a question about an item.

What a line is made of

Every item answers three questions: what is it, how much of it, and what does it cost?

Part	Field	Notes
What	Item Name, Description, Item Size	What you are buying or doing
Where	Cost center	Which trade it belongs to
How much	Quantity, Unit, Wastage (%)	See Getting a quantity
What it costs	Price, Markup, GST	See Prices, markups and GST

Quantity × price gives the item cost. Sum the items in a cost center and you have the trade total. Sum the trades and you have the job.

The three menus

The BOQ toolbar has three dropdowns, and knowing which does what saves a lot of hunting:

Items — everything that creates or restructures items: Add New Item, Import Assembly, Import from Price Lists, Organise Items, Edit Cost Codes, Change Sorting, Show Orphan Items.

Operations — everything that acts on what you have selected: Copy, Cut, Paste, Select All, Delete selected, Duplicate selected, Switch on/off selected.

Reports — the outputs. See Reports.

Included and excluded items

Items can be switched on or off. A switched-off item stays in the bill, keeping its quantity and rate, but does not count toward the total.

This is how you price an option without deleting anything. Carry the tiled roof and the colorbond roof as separate items, switch on whichever the client wants, and the total follows.

Only Included Items filters the view to what is currently counting.

Cost centre status

Where switching an item off works one line at a time, status works on a whole cost centre. Each one carries a status you set from the dropdown at the top of the cost centre, in this order:

Status	What it means	How it looks
Not Required	This trade is not part of the job	Plain
Not Completed	Still being priced	Pink
Waiting for Quotation	Priced out, waiting on a subcontractor’s number	Yellow
Completed	Priced and checked	Teal

Not Required contributes zero to the job total. Every item under it stops counting — not deleted, not hidden, just excluded from the money.

That is what makes a full standard structure workable on a small job. Import your fifteen-trade template onto a bathroom renovation, mark the eleven trades that do not apply as Not Required, and the total is correct without deleting anything you might want back.

The other three are progress markers for whoever is building the bill. Waiting for Quotation is the useful one on a live tender: it separates “I have not priced this yet” from “I have done my part and I am waiting on somebody else”, which are very different problems when the deadline is close.

Working through a bill by keyboard

Moving between cost centres, and the two statuses you set most:

Key	Does
`F9`	Previous cost centre
`F10`	Next cost centre
`F7`	Mark this cost centre Not Required
`F8`	Mark it Completed

Together those are a fast way to work down a bill: F10 to the next trade, price it, F8 to mark it done, F10 again. Trades that do not apply take one F7 and drop out of the total as you pass them.

Not Completed and Waiting for Quotation have no shortcut deliberately — they are the states you land in by working, not ones you jump to. Set them from the dropdown.

Inside the grid itself, the Quantity and Cost boxes behave like a spreadsheet:

Key	Does
`Enter`	Saves, and moves down the same column
`Shift` + `Enter`	Saves, and moves up the same column
`Tab`	Saves, and moves across to the next field

So you can key quantities straight down a trade without reaching for the mouse: type, Enter, type, Enter. The value in the box you land on is selected, so typing replaces it. Every one of those moves saves the box you just left — there is no separate save.

Taking an edit back

Because those edits save as you leave each box, there is no “cancel”. Instead:

Key	Does
`Ctrl` + `Z`	Undoes the last Quantity or Cost edit
`Ctrl` + `Shift` + `Z`	Redoes it

The same two are on the toolbar as ↺ and ↻, and they grey out when there is nothing to undo or redo. Each one tells you which item it put back.

A few things worth knowing:

It covers the Quantity and Cost boxes — the ones you type into. The one-click toggles are not included; click them again instead.
It remembers the last 25 edits, and only in the cost centre you are in. Switching cost centre starts a fresh history.
While you are still typing in a box, Ctrl + Z is your browser’s own undo for the characters in that box. Ours takes over once you have left it — which is also the point at which there is a saved edit to take back.

PS and PC items

PS/PC flags an item as a Provisional Sum or Prime Cost allowance — money carried for work not yet fully specified.

Flagging them matters because they are the items most likely to become variations. When the client picks the tapware and it costs more than the PC allowance, the difference is a variation, and having flagged the item makes that conversation straightforward.

Provision carries the allowance amount.

Items over budget

Once a job is running, money starts coming back the other way: purchase orders committed against an item, and invoices actually recorded against it. The BOQ compares both against what the estimate allowed for that item — its Total.

When either has passed it, the item is marked:

A pink bar down the left edge of the row, in the same place on every row so a long sheet can be scanned for it.
The Total goes pink with a warning triangle. Total is always on screen, which is the point — the Ordered and Actual Cost columns are optional, and an overrun you have to switch a column on to see is one you will not find.
Ordered and Actual Cost, when those columns are shown, go pink individually — so you can see which of the two blew, not just that something did.

Hover any of them for the detail: which figure, how much over, and the percentage.

Ordered and Actual are judged separately, never added together. An invoice normally settles an order that is already counted in the Ordered figure, so adding them would double-count and flag items that are perfectly fine.

Nothing here changes a number or blocks anything. It is a prompt to go and look.

Finding them

Over budget on the toolbar, alongside Only included and Flagged only, narrows the list to just these items. The label turns pink while it is on, so a short list is never mistaken for an empty cost centre.

It filters on the server across the whole scope in view, not just the rows already on screen, and it combines with the other two - Over budget plus Only included gives you the overruns that are still in the quote, leaving out the switched-off ones.

What reads from the BOQ

Module	Reads
Purchase Orders	Items, to raise orders against
Expenses	Items and cost centers, to code invoices to
Progress Claims	Item values, to claim against
Variations	Adds items to the bill
Take-Off	Feeds quantities into items via fields

This is why an item’s cost center matters so much: it decides how the item is grouped everywhere else.

Locking

Lock Ordered or Billed Items stops items being changed once an order or an invoice exists against them.

Turn it on. Editing the quantity on an item you have already ordered against silently breaks the relationship between what you committed and what you allowed, and the discrepancy usually surfaces months later.