There is a particular silence in a site meeting when a contractor asks how a quantity was arrived at, and the answer is somewhere in a spreadsheet that four people have edited.
Our bills of quantities used to be exactly that. Thousands of rows, built up over weeks, copied between team members, emailed to contractors, then revised when the drawings changed. Somewhere in that chain a rate would change and nobody could say who changed it or why. The number was probably right. "Probably right" is not a defensible position when the amount in dispute runs to seven figures.
Moving quantity surveying onto Ofivio Planning & QS fixed that specific problem, and a few we had stopped noticing.
Disclosure: ARKA and Ofivio share a founder. We use the product on live projects, which is why we can write about it in this much detail. Treat this as a practitioner's account, not an independent review.
The problem is not the spreadsheet. It is what the spreadsheet cannot do
Excel is a superb calculator, and no quantity surveyor should apologise for using it. The trouble is what a spreadsheet cannot hold.
It cannot tell you which drawing revision a measurement came from. It cannot record who changed a rate at eleven at night. It cannot connect the item you measured to the purchase order that bought the material, the delivery that arrived, the valuation that paid for it, or the variation that changed it. Each of those connections exists in a real project. In a spreadsheet world, each one lives in a separate file, and a human being is the integration layer.
The phrase on Ofivio's QS page stuck with us: the bill is data, not a spreadsheet with a nicer border. That is the whole argument in one line.
Measurement that stays attached to the drawing
Take-off now happens into the bill itself, against the drawing revision it came from. When a drawing is revised, we know which items are affected, because the measurement remembers where it came from.
For teams setting up a bill properly for the first time, Ofivio's walkthrough on how to prepare a BOQ for a construction project covers the discipline, and its BOQ and quantity surveying pages show how measurement, rates and valuations are held together. We wrote the client-facing version of this in how to read a BOQ before you sign with a contractor.
Rate build-ups you can show someone
A rate is an argument: material, labour, wastage, overhead, profit. When it lives as a single number in a cell, the argument is lost and only the conclusion survives.
Build-ups are now recorded as build-ups. When a contractor challenges a rate, we open it. Most challenges end there, which is better for everyone. Ofivio's framing is that this is quantity surveying software for the people who have to defend the number, and defending numbers is most of the job.
If you are comparing tools rather than taking our word for it, its roundups of BOQ software for architects and quantity surveying software set out what to look for.
Tendering: the same bill, so the quotes compare
The oldest trick in tendering is not a high price. It is a bill that has been quietly reorganised so the tenders cannot be compared.
Tenders now go out against our bill and come back against our bill. Comparison is line against line, not document against document. The gap between the cheapest and the most complete tender becomes visible immediately, which is usually the most useful hour of the whole procurement process.
The purchasing side of the same process is covered on Ofivio's procurement page, and its guide to the procurement process in construction runs from requisition through order, delivery and payment. Our own version, aimed at homeowners buying their own materials, is in procurement on building projects.
From the bill to the site, and back
This is where the connection earns its keep. Ofivio Build takes the same bill onto the site: orders are raised against bill items, deliveries are recorded against orders, and site progress is recorded against the same lines that were measured and priced.
Their description of it is that the bill, the order, the delivery and the store sit on one thread. In our old setup those were four documents in three places maintained by two people who were not speaking to each other by the end of a difficult month.
The wider picture of how this runs day to day is on the construction management page, with materials held on site covered under inventory management.
Valuations that mean something
The principle we now work to is simple: progress is what the client accepted. Not what was claimed, not what looks finished from the gate.
Valuations are measured against the bill, variations that were properly approved are added, retention comes off, previous certificates are deducted, and the certificate is issued. Because every one of those elements already exists in the system, producing a certificate stopped being a two-day exercise in reconciliation.
Ofivio's explainer on what an interim payment certificate is walks through one line by line. We have written the client-facing version in interim payment certificates.
Variations priced against something
Variations are where private projects in Pakistan lose control of their budgets. A change is agreed verbally on site, built, and priced afterwards, when the client has no leverage and the contractor has every incentive.
With a live bill, a variation is priced against existing rates before the work begins. The conversation happens while the client can still say no. Ofivio's article on handling client variations is the clearest short treatment of this we have read, and we set out our own process in client approvals and variations.
The records underneath the numbers
A valuation is only as good as the site records supporting it. Daily reports, photographs before a pour, delivery notes, instructions given and received. These now attach to the project rather than living in a phone.
Ofivio's daily site report guide includes a workable template, and when the project reaches completion its snag list guide covers closing out properly. Our own versions are in daily site reports and snag lists and handover.
What the contractors made of it
We expected resistance, and at first we got it. A bill that shows its working removes room to manoeuvre, and not every contractor welcomes that.
What changed their minds was the speed of payment. When a valuation can be checked in an hour instead of argued over for a fortnight, certificates get issued on time and money moves. The contractors who price honestly ended up preferring it, because their claims stopped being lumped in with everyone else's guesswork. The two who did not prefer it were, in hindsight, telling us something useful.
There is a second effect we did not anticipate. Because variations are priced before they are built, site conversations became shorter. Nobody negotiates the same item twice.
Rates that move
Steel and cement prices in Pakistan can move enough within a quarter to reshape a budget. In a spreadsheet world, re-pricing a bill meant a day of careful editing and a real risk of overwriting something that mattered.
Now a rate is updated in one place, with the previous rate still recorded and dated. We can show a client exactly what the same building would have cost three months ago and what it costs today, which turns an awkward conversation into an arithmetic one. Our note on cost planning for construction covers how to build that volatility into a budget from the start.
Was Excel really the problem?
Partly. The honest answer is that Excel was not the problem; disconnection was. A spreadsheet that is the only record of a number, with no link to the drawing that generated it or the payment that follows from it, is a liability regardless of how good the formulas are. Ofivio argues the general case in Excel vs project management software, and the specifically local case in construction management software in Pakistan.
We still use Excel. We use it for scratch calculations and for one-off analyses. We no longer use it as the place a contract sum lives.
What it costs, and what it demands
The QS product starts free for a single user and at USD 5 a month for a small team, with larger bands as the team grows; current numbers are on the pricing page. For a practice that measures, tenders and certifies, that figure is not the deciding factor.
What it demands is more significant:
- Correct measurement. The system will happily hold a badly measured bill. It is a record, not a quantity surveyor.
- Consistent item descriptions. Comparable tenders depend on descriptions that mean the same thing to every bidder.
- Someone who owns the bill. One person must be responsible for the contract bill, or you will end up with four opinions and a dispute.
None of that is new. The difference is that the discipline now leaves a trace, which is precisely what makes a number defensible six months later.
The test we apply now
When a contractor asks how we arrived at a figure, we should be able to answer completely in under a minute: this quantity, from this drawing revision, at this rate, built up like this, certified in this valuation, changed by this approved variation.
That is all a defensible bill has ever meant. Ofivio's overview of the construction industry workflow describes the same loop from the contractor's side.
If you are tendering a project and want the bill prepared properly before you sign anything, request a quote or read about our project management service.
