Your first project, end to end

This tutorial builds one job from an empty screen to a priced Bill of Quantities. It takes about forty minutes the first time. Everything in it is real work you would do on a live estimate — nothing here is a toy example you throw away afterwards.

We will price a small residential extension: 18 Beach Road — Rear Extension, a single-storey addition on a slab, for a client called Hendricks.

There is already a sample project in your account

A new account starts with SAMPLE - 24 Example Street, Springfield: a double-storey home with a priced estimate on it, including formula quantities and contract stages. Open it from Projects List to see how a finished job is put together, change anything you like, and delete it when you are ready to start for real. Nothing else depends on it. The Get Started page you see after signing in links to it.

What you need first

Your company needs at least one supplier and a price list with a few rates in it. If you have not set those up, do Set up your company first — it takes ten minutes and this tutorial will make more sense afterwards.

Step 1 — Create the project

Open Projects List and choose New → Project.

Field	What to enter
Project name	18 Beach Road — Rear Extension
Client	Hendricks — create the client if it does not exist
Address	The site address
Status	Estimating

Save. You now have the middle level of the hierarchy — the job itself.

Step 2 — Create a costing

A project holds no prices. The prices live in a costing.

From Project Settings, choose New → Costing and name it Tender — Rev A.

Naming the costing after what it is pays off later. When the client asks for a cheaper option and you duplicate this into Tender — Rev B (reduced spec), you will be glad neither is called “Costing 1”.

Step 3 — Upload the drawings

Open Documents and upload the architect’s PDF set. Give it a name that matches what the architect called it — A-101 Floor Plan Rev B, not plans final final.

Documents is also where drawing revisions are managed, so when Rev C arrives it supersedes Rev B here rather than sitting beside it as another file.

Step 4 — Set up your cost centers

Open Cost Centers. This is the trade breakdown you will cost against — Preliminaries, Concrete, Framing, Roofing, Brickwork, Carpentry, Plumbing, Electrical, and so on.

Most builders use the same breakdown on every job. Set it up once here and reuse it by duplicating a costing, or by loading a standard structure.

Step 5 — Take off the quantities

Open Take-Off and open your floor plan.

Set the page scale, create a take-off field for each quantity you need, and measure. For this extension you might create:

Field	Unit	Height / depth	Measure with
Slab area	M2	—	Area
Slab concrete	M3	Depth 0.1	Area
External wall	M2	Height 2.7	Polyline
Internal doors	Each	—	Count

The full walkthrough is in What Take-Off is, and your first measurement.

Step 6 — Build the Bill of Quantities

Open Bill of Quantities. Add an item under each cost center for the work it covers — concrete supply and place, mesh, formwork, brickwork, and so on.

For each item you need three things: a description, a rate, and a quantity.

• Description — what the item is. Pull it from a price list where you can, so it is worded the same on every job.
• Rate — from your price list, from a supplier’s product, or typed in.
• Quantity — this is the interesting one.

Getting the quantity

There are four ways, and choosing the right one is most of the skill.

Method	Use it when
Manual entry	A one-off number that comes from nowhere else
Field	The quantity was measured in Take-Off
Calc sheet	You need to show a small calculation, dimension-book style
Formula	The quantity derives from other quantities

For the concrete item, open Calculate Quantity, choose the Fields tab, and pick Slab concrete. For the mesh, pick Slab area. For the brickwork, pick External wall.

Step 7 — Apply your markup

Back in Project Settings, set the markups for this costing — overheads, margin, and any contingency.

The BOQ shows cost; the markups turn cost into the price you quote. Keeping them separate means you can see your margin at a glance and change it without touching a single rate.

Step 8 — Check the total

Open the Projects List and find your project. The costing metrics show you the cost, the markup, the derived contract sum and where the margin comes from.

That is a complete estimate.

What happens next

From here the job goes one of two ways, depending on your plan.

If you are tendering the work out, go to Tenders & Quotes, build packages from your BOQ items, and send them to your subcontractors. Prices that come back can be brought into the bill.

If you have won the job, the BOQ becomes the spine of everything that follows:

• Purchase Orders are raised against BOQ items, and track committed cost
• Expenses records the invoices that come back
• Progress Claims claim against what those items are worth
• Variations add to the bill when the job changes
• Schedule & Booking plans the work and books the trades

Prove the round trip

Before you move on, do this one thing. It is the single best demonstration of why the system is put together the way it is.

1. Go back to Take-Off and open your floor plan.
2. Select the slab area and drag one corner out — say the client has added a metre to the alfresco.
3. Go to the Bill of Quantities.

The concrete, the mesh and the formwork have all already changed. You did not recalculate anything, and you did not have to remember which items depended on that measurement.

That is the point of the whole thing.