A new cost plan, and a morning of opening old files
A client wants an order of cost estimate for a three-storey care home by Friday. The senior surveyor remembers doing something similar in the Midlands a few years ago. Someone searches the project drive, finds four folders with similar names, opens the workbook marked FINAL v6, and discovers it was superseded by one called FINAL v6 revised. The rates in it are from before the last round of tender price movement, so they need adjusting, and nobody is sure which index was used.
By lunchtime the team has rates for substructure and frame from one job, roof from another, and mechanical and electrical from a third, each copied by hand into a new template. The cost plan gets done. The effort to find the evidence is repeated on the next one.
Why your own cost data is so hard to reuse
The practice is not short of data. It has years of cost plans, priced bills and tender returns. The problem is that each one was built as a standalone workbook, laid out the way the surveyor on that job preferred.
- Elements are named differently from job to job, so 'upper floors' in one file is 'floors (upper)' in another.
- Rates are stored without the date, location or specification that makes them meaningful.
- Tender returns sit as PDFs from contractors and were never broken into rates.
- The version that reflects the agreed tender is not marked, so old drafts look as valid as final ones.
- Knowledge of which job is a good comparison lives in the heads of two or three senior people.
What the rework actually costs
Senior time goes on searching rather than judging. Junior surveyors, who do not know which old job to trust, either wait for someone to point them at one or pick a rate that looks right. Cost plans for similar buildings come out on different bases, which is awkward when a client compares two of yours side by side. And when a partner leaves, a chunk of the practice's pricing memory goes too.
| Task | Today | With a rates library |
|---|---|---|
| Finding comparable jobs | Memory and folder searching | Filter by building type, region, gross internal area and date |
| Choosing a rate | Copied from one workbook | Several sourced rates shown side by side |
| Updating for time | Manual, index often unrecorded | Base date and adjustment recorded against the rate |
| Showing your basis | Hard to reconstruct | Each rate links back to its source job |
How we build the rates library
- We collect your past cost plans, priced bills and tender analyses from the project drive or SharePoint, and agree which versions count as final.
- Each workbook is parsed and its elements mapped to one standard list, based on the NRM elemental structure your practice already uses, with a person confirming the mappings the tool is unsure about.
- Every rate is stored with its source job, base date, location, building type, gross internal area and any specification notes found alongside it.
- Tender returns in PDF are read with a language model that extracts the priced items into rows, which a surveyor checks before they join the library.
- A search screen lets a surveyor filter comparable jobs and see the spread of rates for an element, not just one number.
- Chosen rates export into your cost plan template in Excel, carrying the source reference with them.
The library suggests. It does not price. Deciding whether a school in Leeds is a fair comparison for a school in Bristol, or how much to allow for a difficult site, remains a surveyor's call, and the tool is built to show its evidence so that call is easier to make and to defend.
After the library is in place
A surveyor starting a cost plan opens the library, filters to care homes of a similar size, and sees rates from every relevant job the practice has done, each with its date and a link to the original. They pick, adjust and note the reason. The cost plan carries a clear basis, and the next person looking at it can see where each figure came from.
Each finished job feeds back in, so the library grows without anyone setting time aside to maintain it.
Does this sound like your practice?
- Cost plans start with someone searching old project folders.
- Only a few senior people know which past jobs are good comparisons.
- Tender returns are filed as PDFs and never analysed into rates.
- You cannot easily show a client where a rate in your cost plan came from.
- Two cost plans for similar buildings used noticeably different approaches.