The Bill of Quantities explained

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.

The bill, with its items under the cost codes they belong to.

What a line is made of

Each line carries its own quantity, rate, supplier and cost code.

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 code	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 code and you have the trade total. Sum the trades and you have the job.

Choosing what to look at

The box at the top left of the bill, beside Cost Codes, decides which cost codes the bill is showing. Click it and a panel opens with every cost code on the job, already scrolled to the one you are on, which shows in bold:

• Each row tells you what is in it — how many items, and what they add up to — so you can see where the money is before you open anything.
• The coloured dot and bar are the cost code’s status: teal for Completed, grey for Not Required, orange for Waiting for Quotation, an empty circle for Not Completed.
• Type to find one. It matches the code and the name, so brick, 40-3 and painter all work. Press Enter to show the first match straight away.
• The status chips narrow the list to one status, and Only with items hides the cost codes with nothing in them yet. It starts off, so every cost code is there to pick, including an empty one you are about to add items to.
• Where your cost codes sit inside one another, the panel shows them that way, with the group above its members. Click the arrow to fold a group away.

Click a cost code’s name to show just that one — the quick way, same as before.

Looking at several at once

Until you ask for more, the list is one click, one cost code. Press Pick several at the foot of the list and tick boxes appear; clicking a name now ticks it instead of opening it. Tick the cost codes you want and press Show in BOQ, and the bill shows all of them together, each in its own section with its own sub-total. Tick a group and everything in it is ticked. Press Picking several again to go back to one at a time.

This is how you price related trades side by side — brick supply, lintels and the bricklayer on one screen — instead of stepping between them. When the bill is already showing several, the list opens with its tick boxes on.

Each section is headed with its place in your cost codes, code and name at each level — 40 External › 40-270 Brick Supply — so you always know which part of the job a line belongs to. This WBS in the totals bar becomes the budget of all of them together.

A few things work on one cost code at a time, and are greyed out while several are ticked:

• Order, Invoice, Quote, Variation and Tender, on the ribbon and in the actions menu — each of them is raised against one cost code.
• + Item and Paste, because a new line needs one place to go.
• The cost code status dropdown and its note, as they are with All items.

Duplicate selected still works: each copy lands in its own original’s cost code.

To go back to one, click a name, or press Clear and tick just the one.

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 (which now opens Items in no cost code, the same window as Organise 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

The toilet hire is switched off. It keeps its 12 weeks and its $45 rate, and its total reads $0.00 — it is still there, it is just not counting.

Items can be switched on or off with the switch in the Inc column — blue and to the right is on, grey and to the left is 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.

Switch off rather than delete

A deleted item takes its rate, its supplier and its history with it. A switched-off item costs nothing and is one click from coming back. When a client is still deciding, switch off.

Cost code status

Where switching an item off works one line at a time, status works on a whole cost code. Each one carries a status you set from the dropdown at the top of the cost code, 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 codes, and the two statuses you set most:

Key	Does
F9	Previous cost code
F10	Next cost code
F7	Mark this cost code 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.

With several cost codes ticked:

• F10 moves to the cost code after the last one ticked, and F9 to the one before the first — on its own. Stepping walks the job, so it always lands you on one definite cost code.
• F7 and F8 set the status of every ticked cost code at once, after asking you to confirm. Handy for marking a whole group Completed in one go.

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 code you are in. Switching cost code 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.

Delete is not undoable

Deleting an item removes it along with its products, its specification links and its take-off link. That cannot be rebuilt from an undo history, which is why deleting asks you to confirm and Ctrl+Z will not bring it back. If you are unsure, use Switch off selected instead — the item stays, at no cost.

An item that is on an order, an invoice, a tender, a quote or a colour selection cannot be deleted at all, because its lines on those would go with it. The delete button on its row leaves it where it is and tells you what it is on — for example This item is on order “Frame supply”, so it can’t be deleted. Delete selected skips it and tells you how many it skipped.

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.

An item with no budget at all

An item switched off still has a Total of zero, so an order or an invoice against one is marked too — with different wording, because nothing in the quote is covering it. That is usually worth a look: it is money on the job the estimate is not carrying.

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

Finding them

Filter on the toolbar (the funnel icon), then tick Over budget, narrows the list to just these items. The Filter button turns pink while it is on, so a short list is never mistaken for an empty cost code.

The filters under Filter all work across the whole scope in view, not just the rows already on screen, and they combine: Over budget plus Included gives you the overruns that are still in the quote, leaving out the switched-off ones. The number on the button says how many filters are on; Show everything in the panel clears them.

Labour, material and subcontractors: cost types

Setting a cost type only sorts the items. No quantity, rate or total moves.

Every item has a cost type: Allowance, Fee, Labour, Material, Subcontractor, Freight, or any your company has added. It is how you answer “how much of this job is labour?”

• Filter on the toolbar (the funnel icon):
  • Cost types - tick the types to show only those.
  • Group by cost type puts a heading over each type, with its item count and subtotal. Click a heading to fold it away. With several cost codes showing, the groups sit inside each cost code. Dragging items into a new order is off while grouped.
  • Totals by cost type turns on a line under the totals bar (off to start with).
• The totals line, for example Labour 48,200.00 · Material 112,900.00 · Subcontractor 86,000.00, adds up the items on screen: the cost codes you are looking at, after any filter. Switched-off items count as nothing, as in the grid. Click a type to show only that type; click it again to show everything.
• The Cost type column lets you change an item’s type right in the grid. It is off by default: turn it on from Choose columns (the columns icon at the right-hand end of the heading row).
• Many at once: tick the items, then Actions → Set cost type.

Not set, and old “Allowance” items

An item nobody has given a type shows as Not set. Until September 2026 such items were quietly saved as Allowance. So on older estimates, a big Allowance total usually means “never sorted”, not real allowances. Group by cost type, look through the Allowance group, and use Set cost type to sort it out.

Items taken from a price list bring the price list item’s cost type with them. Sorting the types out once in the price list fixes every estimate you build afterwards.

GST-free items

Filter on the toolbar, then tick GST-free, shows only the items whose GST box says GST-free. These are usually council fees, certifier fees and some authority charges. It works like the other filters, over every cost code in view.

To change many at once, tick them and use Actions → Set GST. See Prices, markups and GST for what the setting affects.

What reads from the BOQ

Module	Reads
Purchase Orders	Items, to raise orders against
Expenses	Items and cost codes, 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 code matters so much: it decides how the item is grouped everywhere else.

Locking

Once the job is being built

When a job’s stage is Under construction, its estimate is locked. The estimate is now the yardstick for progress claims, budget against actual cost, the over-budget warnings, Earned Value and your margin. A quantity or rate changed after signing would leave the client’s price where it was but quietly move every one of those figures. A bar across the top of the Bill of Quantities says the estimate is locked and why.

	Under construction	Finished
Quantities, rates, products, markups, GST	Locked	Locked
Adding, deleting, copying in, switching items on or off	Locked	Locked
Measurements that drive an item’s quantity	Locked	Locked
Flags, progress, notes, cost type, specification, colour selection	Can change	Locked
Orders, invoices, quotes, tenders, variations	As usual	As usual

To change the job after signing, raise a variation. That keeps a record of what changed and why, and gets the client to pay for it.

Unlocking. Moving the job back to an earlier stage (Production estimate is the stage meant for re-working the budget) unlocks the estimate. Only people with the Unlock an estimate under construction permission can do that; administrators have it, and an administrator can give it to others under Users.

Ordered or billed items

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.

In this section

• Adding items
• Getting a quantity
• Formula fields
• Prices, markups and GST
• Suppliers and products
• Organising items
• Bulk operations
• Specification
• Reports
• BOQ settings