You price a job, you win it, you’re happy. Then you get on site and the thing you didn’t measure turns up anyway. The work still has to be done, the materials still have to be bought, but there’s nothing in the bid to cover it. That shortfall doesn’t come off the client. It comes straight out of your margin.
One line left off is all it takes. And it’s rarely the big obvious stuff that gets missed. It’s the bits that hide in the drawings.
The lines that get left off
When a takeoff is rushed, or done off a quick look at the plans, the same things tend to slip through.
The stuff between trades. Builder’s work in connection with the M&E, making good after first fix, the bits that aren’t clearly one trade’s job so nobody prices them.
The groundworks nobody could see from the plan. Muck away, extra dig, working space, the drainage runs that only show up when you read the drawings properly.
The finishes and the small quantities. Skirtings, trims, sundries, fixings. Each one is small. Add up ten of them across a job and it’s real money.
The preliminaries. Access, scaffold, welfare, the time on site. Easy to forget when you’re focused on the physical build, expensive to forget when the job runs long.
None of these are exotic. They get missed because measuring the whole job off the drawings takes time and a proper method, and when you’re pricing at night after a full day, that’s exactly what you haven’t got.
Measure it all, to a standard
The way you stop things slipping through is to measure the whole job off the drawings, in full, to a proper standard. We measure every element to NRM2, the New Rules of Measurement. That means the job is broken down the same consistent way every time, so there’s a place for everything and nothing falls between the gaps.
You get it back as a clean bill of quantities, every item measured and priced, laid out so you can see exactly what’s in the number before it goes in your bid. Nothing missed, nothing padded.
Why a proper takeoff pays for itself
Think about the maths. In a competitive tender, the gap between winning and losing is often a couple of percent. Miss that much on a trade and you either lose the bid, or win it and carry the shortfall yourself.
A measured quantity takeoff done properly costs you a fixed fee, agreed up front. One missed line on site can cost you far more than that, and it comes out of the job you’re already committed to.
Bid knowing nothing's been left off
You shouldn’t have to find out what you missed when you’re standing on site. Send us the drawings, we measure the whole job to NRM2, and you bid from a number that has everything in it.
Send your drawings and we’ll price the lot. See a sample estimate first if you want to see exactly how it’s laid out.
