Estimation grows up

The pricing problem we set out to fix You are pricing a tender. The BoQ is open in one tab and a spreadsheet is open in another, because the spreadsheet is the only place you can actually see where the margin is landing by section. You have priced 80 of 120 rows and you have lost track of whether the project total still hits the gross margin target you walked into the day with. The number at the bottom of the BoQ is technically there, but you have to scroll three screens down to see it. By the time you do you have already forgotten which row you were working on. The BoQ summary says 9.1 percent margin. Your handover target says 10 percent. Are those the same number? They are not. The BoQ is reading a markup percentage. The handover target is a GP margin. Off by enough to matter. This release is for the people who price for a living. The estimators, commercial managers, and QSs who spend hours inside the BoQ Builder and need it to behave like the commercial tool it actually is. The Estimation workspace, at a glance As an estimator, I used to scroll to the bottom of a long BoQ every time I wanted to know how the job was tracking against budget, so I can now see Health, Completion, Cost, Sell, Margin, and Profit in a single strip across the top of the page. Before. The summary numbers were buried at the bottom of the BoQ. You priced, you scrolled, you checked, you scrolled back. The mental cost of staying oriented in a long document was real. After. Seven tiles across the top of the Estimation workspace. Health. Validation status across all items. Surfaces missing prices, broken links, and structural issues before they reach the proposal. Completion. Pricing coverage as a percentage and as a count. The progress bar moves as items are priced. Cost Total. Hard cost of works. The number the builder pays. Sell Total. What the client pays. Margin. Blended GP margin across the BoQ. Profit. Gross margin in dollars. Items. Priced row count broken down by validation state. Why it matters. You can price for an hour and never lose sight of where the job is. The KPI strip becomes a low-grade conscience for the BoQ. Slip below target and you see it. Margin reads true As a commercial manager, I used to mentally convert markup percentages to GP margin every time I looked at a BoQ summary against a handover target, so I can now read the number on the screen as the number my target uses. Before. The Margin column quietly held a markup percentage: (sell − cost) ÷ cost. At a 25 percent GP margin handover target, that surfaced as 33.3 percent in the BoQ. At 10 percent GP it surfaced as 11.1 percent. Close enough to look right. Wrong enough to make cross-checks unreliable. After. Every margin field in the system is now profit ÷ sell. The blended margin in the KPI strip, the margin on every section rollup, the margin on every row in the table, and the margin in the sticky footer all read the same way. The MARGIN tile in the KPI strip spells the formula out so there is no ambiguity. Why it matters. The number on the screen is the number a commercial team quotes. The number on the screen is the number a builder reports to a board. Existing BoQs render with the corrected margin on first open. No migration, no re-pricing, no change to underlying cost or sell figures. Sections that carry their own weight As a QS scoping a 300-row BoQ, I used to scroll through a flat list trying to find which trade was carrying the margin, so I can now collapse every section to its rollup and see where the value sits. Before. A long BoQ was a long scroll. Section breaks existed but they were structural, not informational. To know what Carpentry & Joinery was contributing to the job, you opened it and added the rows up. After. Every section header now carries its own summary on the group line: priced count, cost subtotal, sell subtotal, margin percent, and profit dollars. Collapse the whole BoQ to its section rollups and the commercial shape of the job is visible at a glance. The Group by control lets you reshape the same BoQ around Section, Category, or Cost Code. The filter row beside it scopes the view to all items, manual items only, or items linked from a takeoff. The grouping and filtering are independent: you can group by Cost Code and filter to manual items in a single move, and the rollups recalculate to match. Why it matters. Long BoQs become navigable. You can find the trades carrying the margin without opening them. You can find the trades carrying risk without opening them. The structure of the document starts working with you instead of against you. Totals that follow you, fields that talk to each other As an estimator working through a BoQ row by row, I used to lose visibility of the project totals the moment I scrolled into the detail, so I can now keep the rollup pinned to the bottom of the screen and watch it move as I price. Before. Project totals at the bottom of the page meant the totals disappeared the moment you started working in the detail. Edit a row, scroll back to check, scroll forward to keep going. Repeat for an afternoon. After. A sticky footer pins COST, SELL, PROFIT, and MARGIN to the bottom of the screen at all times. Click any of cost, sell, or margin on any row and the other two recalculate cleanly. Type a margin and the sell rate updates. Type a sell and the margin updates. The relationship is two-way and the rounding behaviour is stable. Validation runs as you type. A row with a cost but no sell shows up as incomplete in the Health tile. A row with a sell below cost flags as negative margin. The Items tile breaks the count down by state so you can see what is priced, what is in draft, and what is broken without filtering manually. Why it matters. Pricing becomes a feedback loop instead of a sequence. Every change is visible in the project total the same moment you make it. The mental switch between "I am editing a row" and "where is the job tracking" disappears. In beta Two adjacent capabilities ship behind a beta flag. They work, they are useful, and they are still firming up at the edges. Both are visibly marked in the workspace. Import BOQ (beta). Bulk-load a BoQ from an external source into the current version. Maps incoming columns to BoQ structure and creates sections, items, and quantities in a single pass. Worth trying on real source files. Edge cases around malformed source data and mixed unit conventions are still being shaken out, so let us know what you run into. Lock & push to Proposal (beta). Lock the current BoQ version and push it through to the proposal flow as the priced basis for the client document. Closes the loop between Estimation and the outbound commercial artefact without an intermediate export to Excel and back. Deep Space · Construction runs better here · Published 17 May 2026