The estimating system and rates library your tenders come from

Two to four estimators, one director with a red pen, and a library that took twenty years to build.

A typical business running one of these has 20 to 80 staff, an estimating department of two to four estimators and a director who adjudicates, and prices a tender or two a week, some of them a thousand lines long. The job is the same whichever generation built it: a 2003 program wrapped round a workbook prices a tender the way a 2020 browser system does.

In the estimator's words, it takes the client's bill of quantities, usually measured to NRM2 or, on older work, SMM7, whether it arrives on paper, as a PDF, as Excel or from a tender portal, and prices each item from a build-up in the library or from a rate on a similar job. Prelims come from the programme, then overheads and profit. The director adjudicates on the summary sheet, the system spreads the adjustment across the rates, and the priced bill goes back in the client's format. The tender register records what was priced, for whom, at what margin, and whether it won. When a job is won, the figures go to the surveyors as the budget.

The rules it holds are what make the library worth more than any package:

• Every material carries a waste allowance of its own, set over years and different from any textbook figure.
• Labour is priced as a gang, so a brickwork item carries two bricklayers and a labourer at the all-in rates updated each January, never a single rate.
• Prelims are priced week by week from the programme, except on tenders below a value the director set, where a percentage is used.
• The adjudication adjustment is spread across the rates after the sum, so the bill still adds up to the tender figure when the client checks it.
• A rate carried over from a lost tender is flagged and cannot be reused until an estimator has reviewed it.

Most of those numbers were set by one senior estimator, who is close to retiring.

It began as the senior estimator's Excel workbook in the late 1990s. Around 2003 a contractor wrote a Visual Basic 6 program to hold the rates library and print the priced bill in the client's layout, and by about 2010 the library had moved into Microsoft Access. The workbook never went away. It still does the summing and the adjudication sheet, and the VB6 program drives Excel to fill it, on estimating PCs that sit on the same Office they had years ago, with the Access file on the office server.

The contractor has gone, and no one since has had the source open. The development environment has been unsupported since 2008, so the program runs but cannot be changed with any confidence, and the link to Excel breaks whenever Office moves. The estimators have learned its moods and work round them.

Some contractors had the lot replaced between 2016 and 2022. A small agency or a freelancer built a web estimating system in PHP, .NET Core or React, Angular or Node, with the rates library imported from the Access file, or an estimator who was handy with these things put one together in Zoho Creator or Bubble. The library opens in a browser, tenders are priced on screen, and nobody drives Excel from VB6 any more. From the estimating office it looked like the workbook's days were numbered.

The bill import is usually where it stuck. It was written around the SMM7 bills the library grew up on, so NRM2 bills arrive with their items unmatched, and a change to one client's portal template broke the Excel route altogether. One adjustment to the spread left a priced bill a few pence out against the tender figure, and adjudication went back to the workbook that week and has stayed there. The freelancer who wrote it took a permanent job, and nobody has logged in to the server since. Since 2023 some estimators have tried a pricing screen of their own in an AI app builder, and the ones that stalled mostly did so short of the spread. So the screen is newer, and the library behind it is just as stuck.

A tender priced in days from a library no competitor has, and a bill that adds up when the client checks it.

Pricing from first principles takes weeks. Pricing from a library takes days, and the library is twenty years of what this business found the work cost, item by item. Two estimators price the same item the same way because they share the build-up, so a tender does not depend on who was in that week.

The adjudication is where the director earns the margin, and the sheet in front of them comes from the same numbers as the bill, which is why they trust it. After the meeting the spread does the arithmetic the client will check. The register answers the question that comes up on every new enquiry: what was priced for this client last time, at what margin, and whether it won.

None of this has stopped. It has started to cost time.

The VB6 program and Office do not get on. The VB6 development environment has been unsupported since 2008, and the program drives Excel through automation that an Office update can break. So the estimating PCs are kept on an old Office, and nobody upgrades anything on them in case the printing stops.

The library lives in one head. The senior estimator built the build-ups over twenty years, and the outputs and waste allowances are written down nowhere except in the rates themselves. A new estimator cannot tell why a rate is what it is, and neither can the director.

Every tender is a copy of the workbook. Each tender starts as a fresh copy of the pricing workbook, and the formulas drift between copies. A change to the prelims template has to be made in every live tender by hand, and a bill that arrives as Excel or through a client's portal is retyped in and retyped out.

The won job leaves the library behind. Neither the VB6 program nor the browser system that followed it was ever joined to job costing. When a tender is won, the figures are retyped into the job costing system as a budget and the estimator's assumptions stay in the workbook. Six months later the surveyor is asking what the rate allowed for, and the estimator has moved on to the next tender.

The same library and the same way of pricing, in a browser, with the workbook's job done inside the system.

Each of these comes from a rule or a habit the system already has.

The library written down and versioned. Every build-up with its outputs, waste allowance and gang make-up, dated, with who changed it and why. The January rate update becomes one screen instead of a morning in Access, and the next estimator can see why a rate is what it is.

The client's bill read in, and priced back out in their format. Excel bills and portal templates imported as items, PDF bills read and matched to the library for the estimator to confirm. The priced bill leaves in the layout it arrived in.

One tender, one place. No copies of the workbook. Prelims priced from the programme inside the tender, overheads and profit applied once, the adjudication sheet drawn from the same numbers, the spread done by the system to the penny.

Handover without retyping. A won tender becomes the job budget by cost code in the job costing system, with the estimator's assumptions attached to each item, so the surveyor can see what the rate allowed for.

A history you can ask questions of. Every tender priced, for whom, at what margin, won or lost, in one place: which work types win, and which clients never award.

Out of the VB6 and off the pinned PCs. The pricing screens in a browser, so an estimator can price from the client's office or from home, and the Office version on the desk stops mattering.

The workbook and the VB6 program are not switched off for any of this. The new screens sit beside them, and the estimators move a tender at a time.

Yes, in the reading and the looking back that come before the pricing: the client's bill, the tender documents and what was priced before.

The pricing itself stays with the estimators.

Bill items matched to the library. A thousand-line bill arrives, and before a rate goes in the estimator works down it finding the build-up that fits each description, which is rarely worded the way the library words it. AI reads each item, proposes the build-up from the library and from similar items on past tenders, and marks the ones it is unsure of. The estimator confirms or changes the match rather than searches for it, and on a bill that size a day of matching typically becomes a morning of checking.

Tender documents read for what moves the price. The preliminaries, the specification and the contract amendments run to hundreds of pages. AI lists the clauses that change the price, such as restricted working hours, access limits or unusual retention, with the page against each, for the estimator to read in full. With a tender or two a week, a first read-through of half a day per tender typically comes down to an hour with the flagged pages.

Questions put to the tender history. What did we price for this client last time, and at what margin? Which groundworks tenders did we win, and how far did adjudication move them? AI answers in plain words from the tender register and the priced bills, listing the tenders it drew on for the estimator to open. A question that meant an afternoon in old workbook copies takes a few minutes.

Not worth doing: AI pricing the tender. The estimator's judgement of the risk, the site and the client beats any model, and the client can tell.

The library has to be secured, with a copy to try changes on, before anything reads from it, so AI waits for the first stage. The assessment says where it would pay back on the estimating system as it stands.

The library first, then the screens, with the workbook beside them until the estimators stop opening it.

1. Secure the library. Out of the Access file and the VB6 program and onto a supported database, with every build-up intact and readable, the workbook's logic written down, a backup restored, and a test copy. This goes first because the library is the asset; everything after it is a way of using it.
2. The pricing screen in a browser. Against the same library, run beside the workbook until the estimators choose it for a live tender.
3. Bills in and out, quotes in. Import and export in the client's formats, and supplier quotes captured into material prices.
4. Adjudication, handover, history. Each a stage, each priced on its own, each live in weeks.
5. Retire the VB6 program and the workbook when nothing still depends on them. The last thing to go is usually the director's adjudication sheet.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For an estimating system that means a few days with the estimators, the director and the code, finding how the library, the program and the workbook connect, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page, and so does each technology the system is built on: Excel to a system, Microsoft Access and Visual Basic 6, and for the newer generation old PHP, .NET Core and React, Angular and Node. Where the program needs keeping alive before any of this starts, legacy software support is the page for that. And if the question is whether to buy a package instead, replace or modernise sets out how to decide.