Construction Estimating and Tender Pricing, Under Your Own Name

The standard turnaround is two working days from the point we agree the basis of the estimate. Repeat work priced from a rate library we have already built for you is frequently faster. Tell us the return date before anything else and we will give you a straight yes or no on whether we can hit it — we would rather decline a tender than miss the deadline, because a late return scores nothing at all rather than a lower number.

No. One tender, one bidder, first to instruct. If we are already pricing a package you send us, we tell you straight away and decline the work. That is written into our engagement terms rather than being a matter of goodwill, and we will sign your NDA before any drawings change hands.

A desk rather than one person. Between us we have thirty-three years of construction and estimating experience, and every pack is reviewed and signed off by a career estimator before it is released. Alongside that, a team of digital colleagues working inside the Vyntworks platform handles the mechanical work — taking off the drawings, extracting schedules, building the trade sections and producing the documents. They follow our written pricing methods rather than improvising, they work to set approval limits, and every action is logged. You get the capacity of software with the judgement of somebody who has priced this kind of work for years.

Both. Where a bill or a schedule of works is issued with the tender we price it as it stands and query the ambiguities in writing. Where there is no bill, we take off from the drawings and build a schedule of works structured by trade and measured to NRM2, with preliminaries, provisional sums and dayworks set out separately, so the submission reads the way a quantity surveyor expects. Rates you do not hold yourself are priced against published data and BCIS benchmarks, and marked as such. Everything is priced in sterling, excluding VAT, and under JCT or NEC as the tender requires.

No. Every client gets an account because it is the fastest way to hand over an estimate you can actually interrogate, but plenty of people never log in and simply work from the PDF and the emailed summary. If you would rather we made every change, two revisions are included in the fee and you can send the rest by email. The account costs you nothing either way and carries no licence or commitment.

Vyntworks — an operations platform built for contractors, covering estimating, procurement and cost control in one connected system. You get an account on it, so when a pack is ready you are notified and the estimate is there to review, adjust and submit rather than arriving as a flat document you can only accept or query. Access is limited to you, the people you invite from your own business, and the estimator working on your package. Your documents and rate library sit in a tenancy specific to your company and are never pooled with, or used to price work for, anybody else.

As accurate as the information we are given and the rates we are working from, which is exactly why every pack states both. Every priced quantity is traceable to the measurement or document it came from, and the pack is machine-audited before release: nothing can be priced without a source, nothing can be excluded without a stated reason, and every document you send has to be used or explicitly waived. Where the drawings will not support a firm price we carry a stated provisional sum rather than a guess, and it appears in the pricing document where you can see it rather than quietly falling out.

Yours, wherever you have them. Most contractors have rates scattered across old spreadsheets and one estimator's memory, so part of the first job is pulling those into a proper rate library — we can import your existing Excel quotations to do it. Where you have gaps we price from published rate data or go out to your supply chain for real prices, and we mark clearly which is which. The library belongs to you and is exportable at any time, including if you stop working with us.

Only if you tell them. Everything is produced on your letterhead in your format, including your own Word or Excel quotation template if you have one. We never contact your client, we are not named in the documents, and the quotation is issued by you under your own name. The work is white-labelled as standard rather than as an extra.

Not a problem. The take-off reads scanned and photographed drawings as well as native PDFs, and reads the sheet number, title and stated scale from each drawing's own title block. Poor documents widen the assumptions we have to state and can slow us down; they do not stop us. A phone photograph of a marked-up plan is a legitimate starting point.

We re-price against the new revision and hand you a line-by-line difference — what was added, what was removed, what changed, and exactly what it did to your total. Late revisions are one of the most common ways a tender comes apart, and reading two hundred pages again to find the changes is precisely the work you should not be doing three days before the return date.

Yes — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Estimating is done remotely, so location makes no difference to turnaround. Where the job would also benefit from a survey of the existing building, our UK survey operation covers the same territory with travel included in the project price.