Know your margin on every line, as You build out the estimate

Cost, Sell & Margin on Every BOQ Line The BOQ Builder no longer just tracks cost. Every line now carries a live commercial layer. Set sell or margin and the other derives off cost instantly, then watch it roll up across sections and the whole estimate. User story As an estimator pricing a high-volume estimate, I used to carry cost in the tool and margin in my head or simply apply a global margin across the board, so I can now set sell or margin on any line and watch the other derive instantly, with cost, sell, margin and profit rolling up live across every section and the whole estimate. From a cost sheet to a commercial picture Before. The BOQ tracked cost. Sell and margin lived somewhere else, a spreadsheet, a separate column, the estimator's memory. To sanity-check a line you opened it, did the maths yourself, closed it, and trusted the totals downstream agreed. Margin was something you reconciled at the end. After. Every line carries Cost, Sell Rate and Margin together, and the three are bound. Type a sell rate, the margin fills in. Type a margin, the sell rate back-calculates off cost. Save, and the row, the section subtotal, the priced counter and the bill total all re-roll on the spot. The commercial layer, live on the bill Cost, Sell Rate, Margin and Total now sit on every line and roll up per section and across the whole BOQ. Health and completion read the state of pricing at a glance; grouping toggles re-cut the same bill by Section, Category or Cost Code. Per-line economics. Sell Rate and Margin sit alongside Unit Rate; section headers and the page footer roll up Cost, Sell, Margin and Profit. Health, completion and item counts track the state of the bill. Bound off cost, either direction The trio anchors on cost. Enter a sell rate and margin derives; enter a margin and the sell rate back-calculates. True margin (profit ÷ sell), not markup. Enter sell → get margin. Cost $60, Sell $80 → Margin 25.0% ((80 − 60) ÷ 80). Enter margin → get sell. Cost $60, Margin 30% → Sell $85.71 (60 ÷ (1 − 0.30)). Sections are an organising lens, not a second source of truth Manage Sections lets you retag, rename and reorder the bill's structure without touching a single cost code. Items keep their cost code; sections just decide how the bill reads. One modal for structure. Editable tag and name per section, reorder arrows, live item counts. Changes save back to the version and survive reload, cost codes stay put. What sections actually do A section is a grouping of BOQ lines inside a version. It carries a tag (SEC-01) and a name (Preliminaries & Site Establishment), and every line sits in one. Crucially, items keep their cost code regardless of which section they're in, so sections never disturb the financial structure underneath. They change how the bill reads and rolls up, not what anything costs or which code it hits. That makes a section the operational lens on a job: it splits one bill into the sub-projects the builder actually manages, while the project stays a single project with a single head contract. When you'd use them The pattern that drives this is one head contract, one client, one program, but several distinct deliverables that each need their own cost, margin and forecast position. Forcing those into separate projects breaks the single HC and fragments the program; running them as one flat bill averages the signal away (House 1 overrunning gets hidden by House 2 under-running); and shadow-tracking in a Friday spreadsheet is exactly what Deep Space sells against. Sections are the answer instead. Show Image Residential, multi-house developments. Four townhouses on one title, one HC with the developer. Each house has its own bill and its own client variations (a different kitchen spec on House 3). Per-house margin lets you price the next subdivision properly. Commercial, multi-stage fitouts. A three-floor office fitout where each floor signs off and hands back at a different time. PC dates differ, claims are sometimes per-floor and sometimes consolidated, and variations apply to "Level 2 only". See Level 1 closed out while Level 3 is still in flight. Commercial, multi-building campus. A school job with a new classroom block, a gym refurb and a covered walkway under one principal contract. Each building has its own subbies and milestones, and the client wants a claim line per building. Civil and industrial, staged or multi-unit. Staged subdivisions (Stage 1 in defects, Stage 2 mid-construction, Stage 3 in design) or six identical tilt-up units on one slab. One HC, with per-stage or per-unit cost variance to spot which subby is dragging on which unit. Sections vs multiple Head Contracts The two are orthogonal and a project can have either, both, or neither. Multiple Head Contracts is the contractual axis: more than one revenue envelope on a project, used when stages or buildings are separately contracted. Sections are the operational axis: more than one delivery sub-project on a project, used when there's a single contract but the cost story still needs to split. If you only ever reach for multi-HC you end up inventing phantom contracts to model four houses, which is contractual fiction that breaks claim assembly. Sections give you the per-sub-project view without touching the contract structure. The detail that matters Why it matters Pricing and margin stop being two separate jobs. The estimator sets the commercial position on each line right in the tool, sees it roll up immediately, and catches the unpriced and the underpriced while they're still cheap to fix. By the time the bill is built, the margin is already true, not something to be rebuilt before it goes out the door. Deep Space · Construction runs better here · Published 30 May 2026