You've got three days to turn a tender around instead of the two weeks it deserves. You price the obvious stuff fast and move on. The job gets won. Then, on site, the gaps show up, and they're always the same kind of gap. That's the point of a tender estimating checklist: not to slow you down, but to send your limited time to the places where rushed prices keep leaking money.
It isn't the brickwork or the concrete that catches people. Those get measured because they're obvious. It's everything around them.
Preliminaries get squeezed first
When time's short, preliminaries are the first thing to get a rough number instead of a real one. Welfare, access, the scaffold duration, supervision for the length of the actual programme rather than a guess at it. Underprice this and it's not a one-off item you're short on, it's every week the job runs.
The trap is pricing preliminaries as a percentage because that's what you did last time. A percentage doesn't know that this job has a tight site with no room for storage, or that the programme runs through winter, or that the scaffold has to stay up for the roofer after the bricklayer's finished. Preliminaries are time-related and site-related. They need pricing against this programme and this site.
Provisional sums get left as a placeholder and forgotten
A provisional sum for something not yet finalised is normal. What's not normal is leaving it as a round figure nobody's actually thought about, then finding out later it was nowhere near enough to cover what it turned out to be. A provisional sum should still be a considered figure, not a number written in to make the page add up.
It's also worth reading how the provisional sum is described. NRM2 distinguishes between defined and undefined provisional sums, and with a defined one you're generally expected to have allowed for its effect on programme and preliminaries in your price. If you've skipped over that in a rush, you may be carrying time-related costs you haven't priced.
The work between trades falls through the middle
Builder's work in connection with the services. Making good after another trade's first fix. The bits that aren't clearly one trade's job, so in a rush nobody prices them at all. On a properly measured job these get picked up because the whole thing is measured as one job, not stitched together from whichever trade got round to pricing their bit first.
Attendances fall into the same hole. Unloading, storage, power, water, skips and clearing up after subcontractors. Every sub assumes you're providing them. If your tender doesn't include them, nobody's paying for them.
A tender estimating checklist for tight deadlines
When the clock's running, go through these before anything else. They take minutes, and they cover the lines that most often go missing.
- Drawing register. Are you pricing the latest revision of every drawing, and does the spec match them?
- Preliminaries against the programme. Have you priced site set-up, welfare, supervision and scaffold for the real duration, not a percentage?
- Provisional sums. Is each one a considered figure, and have you checked whether it's defined or undefined?
- Builder's work and making good. Have you allowed for holes, chases, fire stopping and making good around services?
- Attendances. Have you priced what subcontractors will expect you to provide on site?
- Temporary works. Propping, shoring, dewatering, protection of existing finishes. Are they in, or clearly excluded?
- External works. Drainage, paths, fencing and reinstatement are often drawn on a separate sheet and easy to miss.
- Exclusions and assumptions. Anything you couldn't price is listed in the tender, not left silent.
Keep the list somewhere you'll actually see it. Print it, pin it above the desk, put it at the top of your pricing spreadsheet. A tender estimating checklist that lives in a folder you never open does nothing. The whole value is that it interrupts you at the moment you're about to press send, when you're tired and the obvious items are done and it feels finished.
And add to it. Every time a job loses money on something that wasn't priced, that item goes on the list. After a few jobs it becomes a record of your own blind spots, which is worth more than any generic version.
If you want a broader version for jobs where you've got more time, there's a longer list in what actually needs checking before you price a job.
Rushed tenders don't go wrong in random places. They go wrong in the same places every time, which means you can check for them.
Measure it properly and the gaps close
None of this is about any one estimator being careless. It's what happens under time pressure, every time. A checklist helps you notice the gaps. Measuring the job properly is what fills them.
The fix is the same regardless of the deadline: measure the whole job off the drawings, to NRM2, so preliminaries, provisional sums and the work between trades all get a real number rather than a rushed one. When every element is measured, the in-between items show up because there's a line for them. You don't have to remember them. They're in the bill.
We measure every job this way and hand you back a bill of quantities you can check line by line before it goes into your bid. The fee is fixed and agreed before we start, and the work is delivered to your tender deadline, so a short turnaround doesn't have to mean a short measure.
The five-minute rule before you press send
Before any tender goes out, however late it is, take five minutes and ask one question for each of the lines above: where is this in my price? If you can point to it, move on. If you can't, it's either missing or buried, and five minutes now is cheaper than finding out on site.