The tender documents arrived on a Wednesday. The return date is the following Friday. You've got two live jobs, a site meeting you can't move and a folder of drawings nobody has opened yet. You could price it yourself over three late nights and hope nothing gets missed. Or you could hand the measuring and pricing to people set up to do it. That's what tender pricing services are for, and it helps to be clear about what they take off your plate and what stays firmly with you.
Why tight deadlines produce bad tenders
Most tenders don't go wrong on the big items. You know roughly what the frame costs. They go wrong on the things nobody got round to measuring: the drainage runs that were guessed, the external works that were rounded, the prelims copied from the last job without noticing the programme is longer this time.
Under time pressure, measuring is the first thing to get cut. It's slow. It's dull. Nobody sees it. But every figure in the tender sits on top of the quantities, and if the measure is wrong the rates hardly matter, because you're multiplying them by the wrong numbers. We've listed the places a rushed tender usually misses things in a separate checklist.
The opposite happens too. Short of time and unsure of the numbers, some contractors pad everything to be safe. The tender goes in high, somebody with a sharper measure comes in under it, and all those evenings were for nothing. Guessing in either direction costs you. A measured price is the only way to know how much room you really have.
What tender pricing services actually cover
Measured quantities
The base of any tender price. Every element measured off the drawings to NRM2, so the quantities are complete and can be checked. This is the slow part and the part most worth handing over. Where drawings are unclear or information is missing, a good service writes it down as an assumption instead of quietly guessing.
Rates
The quantities are then priced. At MPE that means current UK rates, local to where the job is, for labour, materials and plant, rather than a rate book from a few years back. You'll still want to drop in your own subcontractor and supplier quotes where you have them (you should, because those are real prices for this job), but you start from a fully priced base instead of a blank sheet.
Preliminaries
Prelims get underpriced all the time. Site set-up, welfare, scaffolding, skips, supervision, insurances, temporary services: most of it tied to how long you're on site. A proper tender estimate sets them out as their own section, so you can see them, check them against your programme and adjust.
A breakdown you can defend
The finished estimate should be laid out element by element. If the client's QS queries a number, you go straight to the line and show where it came from. A tender price has to survive being read by someone else, and the breakdown is how it does that.
What you still decide yourself
This is the honest bit. A tender pricing service gets you to an accurate cost of doing the work. It doesn't decide what you bid.
- Margin. What you add on top is a commercial call. It depends on how much you want the job, who else is pricing it, how full your order book is and whether this client pays on time. Nobody outside your business should be setting that.
- Risk. Ground conditions, a tight site, a client known for changing their mind, onerous contract terms. You decide how much of that to price in, and how.
- Your own resources. Whether you self-deliver a trade or sub it out, and who you trust with it, changes the number.
- Qualifications and exclusions. What you're prepared to stand behind, and what goes in your tender letter as excluded.
Keeping those calls with you is a good thing. You get the measured cost in time and spend your own limited hours on the judgement, which is where tenders are won or lost anyway.
Making outsourced tender pricing work to a deadline
A few habits make tender pricing services go smoothly.
Send the full tender pack early, not just the drawings. Specification, schedules, pre-construction information, any site investigation you've been given. What isn't sent can't be measured. If a revision lands halfway through, pass it on straight away and say what's changed.
Agree the fee and the return date before any work starts. With us the fee is fixed and agreed up front, and the estimate is delivered to your tender deadline through the client portal. That leaves you room to add your quotes, set the margin and write the covering letter without doing it at two in the morning.
Then read it. Properly. Check a few sample lines against the drawings, check the prelims against your programme, and go through the assumptions list. If something looks off, ask. It's your name on the form of tender.
When it makes sense to use one
Some contractors use outside pricing for every tender. Others only when two deadlines collide or their own estimator is off. Both work. For main contractors juggling several returns at once, outsourced estimating services act as an extra estimating team you only pay for when the work is there. If you're newer to formal tendering, it's worth reading what goes into a tender submission and where the risk sits before you start.
There's a knock-on benefit that gets overlooked. Once the quantities exist, you can send packages out to your own subcontractors and suppliers much earlier, with measured scopes they can price against, instead of waiting until you've done the takeoff yourself. Their quotes come back sooner and on a like-for-like basis. On a short tender period that alone can be the difference between submitting a checked price and submitting a hopeful one.
And if you want to see the format before committing to anything, have a look through a sample estimate. The number you submit is still yours. It just rests on a measure you can trust.