The estimate

What it is

The priced job, line by line, grouped into trade sections, and the gate you keep over it. Base reads the drawings and drafts the estimate; every line it writes lands marked pending, and nothing pending reaches a client or a subbie. Not the quote, not the bill of quantities, not a purchase order, not a tender. Approving a line is what makes it real, so your review is the gate, not a formality.

Every line carries its evidence: which sheet it was read from (the crosshair opens the drawing with the item boxed), why it exists, and where its price came from. Every rate you fix teaches your rate book. The first estimate you review is the hardest; the tenth mostly prices itself from rates you have already confirmed.

The masthead shows the sections, lines, provisional sums and low-confidence lines, the project margin and labour margin, the blended margin where sections differ, the sell price ex or inc GST, gross profit and the net after overhead recovery. Everything downstream of this page is generated from it: the quote, the budget, the schedule of values, purchase orders and tenders.

A few words, translated. Take-off is the assistant reading the plan set and proposing priced lines a trade section at a time. Approved means the line can appear on quotes, purchase orders and tenders; pending means visible only to you. A provisional sum is carried at an allowance and listed separately on the basis of estimate. Supplied by says who buys the material and who does the work, which changes the money and what lands on a sub's purchase order. An inferred line is one the assistant added from experience rather than a document; it says why. A line with a red check chip failed an automatic scale check (hours entered per unit instead of in total, for example).

Before you start

• The drawing set, the spec and any contractor quotes are on the job's Documents. The assistant prices what it can see; a missing mechanical drawing is a missing mechanical section.
• Rates come from the rate book. Rules about how you price are told to the assistant in chat and remembered.
• Once the job is marked won the estimate is locked. Read Mark the job won before you do.

How to

Have Base build the estimate from the plans

1. Upload the full drawing set to the job (see Documents), then ask in chat in plain words: "price this fitout from the attached plans". Add what you know: "client supplies the joinery, we self-perform demo, sparkies are $95/hr". Anything you say about how you price is remembered for every future job.
2. Let it finish before you touch anything. Sections land in the ledger as they are priced, marked pending. Correcting a section mid-run can collide with the section still being written.
3. Review it, then set margins, then produce the paperwork.

Review where the money is

1. Read the Sheet coverage register first. Every document is a group of sheets; a sheet that priced nothing is marked, and documents that produced no lines at all are listed underneath. A title sheet pricing nothing is normal; a services layout pricing nothing is a missed trade. Open each, look, and sign the sheet off either way. The "unsigned only" filter narrows a big set to what still needs eyes.
2. The strip above the table says how few lines carry about 70% of the money and lists the biggest movers, sized by value and how uncertain their rate is. Click a chip to land on the row. Risk order re-sorts each section so the lines that could move the estimate most come first, pending ones on top.
3. Read each section header's labour as a duration. A duration that feels wrong for the trade is an hours error.
4. Counted lines carry one box per item on the drawing; click the crosshair and count a couple of the big ones.
5. A tinted rate sits off your book; its tooltip says by how much. Red on a big line means below book, which is the estimate quietly losing your money. A dotted underline means no book line at all; the assistant's stated basis is in the line's details.
6. Open the details of every amber inferred line and read the one-line reason. Keep it, fix it, or delete it. This is the highest-judgement minute of the review.
7. Lines with a red check chip each need their own look and their own tick.

Approve lines

1. Click the hollow ring at the left of a pending line to approve it; it becomes a tick. On the keyboard, click any row then use the arrow keys to walk the lines, a to approve the focused line and step on, Enter to open its details, e to edit it, Delete to delete it, and Escape to abandon a cell edit.
2. Lines priced from your book with a tight band and three or more observations, sitting on the book and flagging nothing, collapse into a looks safe batch. Spot-check the three it offers, then approve the batch.
3. Approve a whole section, or the whole estimate, from its header. Bulk approve skips any line with a check chip on purpose; the server tells you how many it left.

Fix a number

1. Click a quantity or hours cell, type, Enter. Quantities are per-job facts and teach nothing.
2. Click a rate. The rate sheet opens showing the line, the rate book item behind it, and every other line carrying that rate. Type the new rate, or press Use the rate-book figure, or Pick a price from your suppliers' price lists. Tick how far the fix reaches.
3. Choose what happens to the book: leave it alone, update the item to the new figure, link the line to an existing item, or add a new item. A new item is quality-checked against the book before it can be created, with this job's rooms and codes taken out of its name.
4. Save. The lines you ticked move, and the book learns.

Undo a change

1. Press Undo at the left of the toolbar, or Ctrl+Z (⌘Z on a Mac) when you are not typing in a box. Your last change on this page is taken back: an edit, a line you added or deleted, a section you cleared, a margin or contingency.
2. To go back further, open the arrow beside Undo. It lists every change you have made on this page since you opened it, newest first. Pick one and it and everything after it are undone.
3. A deleted line comes back exactly as it was, approval included.

Change who supplies a line

1. Click the supply pill on the line and pick who buys the material and who does the work.
2. Builder-supplied material stays in the estimate but is excluded from the sub's purchase order value and from their tender scope.

Set margins and contingency

1. Type the project margin in the masthead. Every section inherits it unless it has its own.
2. Set a labour margin to sell labour at its own rate; clear it and labour sells at the material margin.
3. On a section header, override its margin or labour margin and set a contingency. Reset to the project global margin puts a section back.
4. The blended margin on the masthead is the result across all sections. The forecast margin on Job Costs is measured against it for the rest of the job.

Write the exclusions and read the basis

1. Press Notes, exclusions & assumptions and write the exclusions and assumptions as the client will read them.
2. Press Basis of Estimate. It rolls up the number, the documents priced, where the quantities came from (measured against allowed), where the rates came from (book against guessed), provisional sums, assumptions, exclusions, the lines that failed the scale check and the ten largest lines, with a signature block. Print opens it as a page to sign or save as a PDF.

Save and compare revisions

1. Press Save revision snapshot before you send a quote. A revision is also taken automatically every time a quote is sent.
2. Base takes its own revisions too, marked automatic and labelled "Automatic revision": the first when the assistant finishes building the estimate, then one about ten minutes after you stop editing, whenever the estimate has changed since the last revision.
3. Revision history lists them. View one, compare one against now or two against each other, or Restore one as the working estimate. Restoring copies the stored lines and margins, never reprices, lands every line pending, saves the working estimate as a revision first, and is refused once the job is won or a quote accepted.

Bring in an estimate from a spreadsheet

1. Press Import and choose the file. Base shows the sheet as it read it and lets you fix any column it guessed wrong.
2. Tick whether label rows are section headings, where lines above your first heading go, and what to do with anything below your grand total (fees, not works).
3. Your sheet's total is printed next to the total about to be written. If they match, the import is right. Lines land exactly as written; nothing is re-priced.

Ask subbies to price a section, or raise an order

1. Open a section's menu. Tender invitation puts the section out to price; it is an enquiry, not a commitment. See Tenders.
2. Issue purchase order raises an order against the section. If orders are already committed on it, the menu says so and points you to the Tenders page instead.

Mark the job won

1. Approve the estimate. Mark won is blocked while lines are pending and says "Approve the estimate first".
2. Press Mark won. Enter the contract sum (ex GST), the date won, whether the contract is signed, the deposit, payment terms, retention and its cap, and the programme dates.
3. Confirm. The job moves to pre-construction, the budget and schedule of values are built from the estimate, and the estimate locks.

Change a won estimate

1. Change a rate, a quantity, the labour, add or delete a line, or move a margin as you normally would. Instead of saving, Base opens Raise as a variation and prices the change the way the estimate prices a line.
2. Pick Client variation — they pay (a draft for the client to approve, added to an existing draft or a new one) or Absorbed — we wear it (its cost goes on the budget and lowers the margin; it needs a reason). A margin change can only be a client variation, because there is no cost to wear.
3. Confirm. Then generate the variation document, send it to the client for signing, or open it on the Variations page. The estimate's lines stay exactly as they were won.

What happens on its own

• Every rate you confirm or correct is recorded against the rate book as an observation, with you as the source. A corrected rate can fix every other line carrying it in one go.
• Sections the assistant commits replace that section. If one trade spans several drawing files, ask for it as one proposal, or the second file overwrites the first. The proposal history is kept.
• A plan check of the drawing set runs in the background when the estimate is started from plans and sits above the ledger: whether the set was complete and consistent, what was missing that had to be assumed, and what to ask the client for. It never blocks anything.
• Once the assistant has finished an estimate, Base saves an automatic revision of it, then another each time you stop editing for about ten minutes and the estimate is different from the last revision. Reordering lines or editing notes alone does not make one.
• The estimate does not chase the budget. After the win, the budget on Job Costs is rebuilt only when a person asks.
• Notes, review ticks, plan boxes, coding and sort order can still be tidied on a won job; none of them carries money.

Things that surprise people

• Approve is the load-bearing word. If a quote looks thin, look for unapproved lines first.
• Hours without a labour rate cost nothing. A line with hours and no $/hr is flagged when you edit it.
• Measured areas and lengths depend on drawing scale; spot-check one known dimension per drawing set the way you always have. Counted items are verifiable by their boxes.
• The lock is derived from the job's status. Moving the job back to a not-won status is the unlock, deliberate and visible. There is no flag to flip. Someone allowed to may also unlock with a written reason, and the relock records what changed.
• Undo covers what you did on this page during this visit. It starts empty when you open the page again, and it does not undo the assistant's changes; for those, use Revision history or ask the assistant.
• Undo will not overwrite a line someone changed after you. If the assistant or a colleague has edited the same field since, that line is left as it is now and Undo tells you.
• Undoing a rate change puts the lines back, but not a rate-book change made in the same sheet. Change that in the rate book.
• An estimate you built by hand or imported gets no automatic revisions until the assistant has checked it as complete. Save revisions yourself until then.
• A margin change on its own does not start the ten-minute clock for an automatic revision. It is captured with your next line edit, or press Save revision snapshot.
• Restoring a revision lands every line pending again. That is the point: it is a draft until you say otherwise.

Related

• Rate Book — where the rates come from and go back to
• Scope of works — cut from the approved estimate
• Documents — the quote, bill of quantities and scope PDFs
• Tenders — pricing trades you do not do yourself