About BuiltUp
Pricing is the bottleneck. That is the whole reason BuiltUp exists.
Not the site work. The pricing. A client sends a schedule of works as a spreadsheet, every line has to be read and given a rate, and it gets done at nine at night after a full day on site. BuiltUp takes the documents in, prices them against your own rates, and hands the job back in the format your client sent it.
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The evening job
Quotes get done after the day is finished.
Ask a small contractor when they price. The answer is almost never during working hours. The day goes on the job: the deliveries, the labour, the client who wants a word, the sub who has not turned up. Pricing waits until everyone has gone home.
Then a schedule of works lands. Thirty lines, or two hundred, written in the client's own sections with their own item numbers, and every one has to be read, understood and given a rate. Miss the deadline and the work goes elsewhere. Rush it and the margin goes instead.
The tools on offer do not help much with that. One is a spreadsheet: free, familiar, and entirely manual. The other is enterprise software, priced and shaped for a main contractor with an estimating team. Between the two there is a gap, and most of this industry works in it.
How we compare to the spreadsheet
What BuiltUp does
Documents in. Priced on your rates. Back in their format.
That is the whole product, described the way it actually runs. Everything else in it exists to serve those three steps.
Documents in, as they arrived
Drawings and a spec, a client's schedule of works as a spreadsheet, or photographs and a voice note off a walk round. Upload what you were sent, in the state you were sent it. Nothing has to be retyped into our layout first.
Priced against your own book
Your material catalogue, your labour roles, your markup, your prelims. Every priced line opens into the materials and hours behind it, so the total can be taken apart and argued with rather than accepted on trust.
Handed back in their format
What comes back is a copy of the client's own file with the rate and total cells filled in. Their sections, their item numbers, their wording, their column widths. Read the return against the original and judge it on that.
What we believe
Four rules the product is built to.
These are not preferences. They decide what gets built and, more often, what does not. If you are weighing up whether to trust something else with your pricing, these are the four questions worth putting to it.
Your rates, not ours
A national average is somebody else's cost base, bought on somebody else's terms. BuiltUp prices against the catalogue and the labour roles you set up, and where you have not given it a rate it tells you, rather than quietly reaching for a benchmark.
The figure has to be checkable, line by line
A total nobody can take apart is a total nobody can defend six months later. Every line carries the materials, the hours and the rate it was built from, and what it was measured off. If you cannot follow it back to a decision you made, it should not be in the quote.
Graded, not plausible
Anything it measures comes back marked high, medium or low confidence, so you check the handful it was unsure about instead of re-checking the lot. A line it cannot price is left blank with the reason next to it. A wrong rate is worse than a visible gap, because you will spot the gap.
The file you send back is the file they sent you
Re-keying a client's schedule into your own template creates an evening of typing and, later, an argument about what changed between the two documents. Their layout goes out the way it came in, with the pricing columns filled and everything else untouched.
One job
Priced against a figure that already existed.
A client sent over a 33-item schedule of works. BuiltUp priced it and handed back the same spreadsheet, with their sections, their item numbers and their wording intact, and the rate and total columns filled in. The total came out within about 6% of the figure the client's own estimator had reached by hand.
That is one job. It is not a benchmark and it is not being offered as one. It is the reason we suggest the same test to anybody looking at this: take a job you have already priced, put it through, and read the return against the number you know is right.
If it agrees with you, you have saved the evening. If it does not, you can open the line and see exactly where it went a different way, which is worth knowing either way.
Who it is for
Built in the UK, for the way work is priced here.
Schedules of works, day rates, prelims, retention, CIS, and clients who expect their own document back. Those are British habits, and a tool written for a different market gets them slightly wrong in ways that cost you an argument later.
Contractors and builders
Small and mid-sized firms pricing domestic work, extensions, refurbishment and fit-out, usually without an estimating department behind them.
Trades
Electricians, plumbers and heating engineers, decorators, groundworkers and landscapers, pricing off day rates and their own supplier prices.
Quantity surveyors
Checking a build-up rather than producing one, and needing to see what a figure was measured from before signing anything.
Project and contracts managers
Working on the job after the tender, where a variation has to be priced and agreed before anyone lifts a tool.
The company
BuiltUp is made by BuiltUp Technologies Ltd, registered in England & Wales, Company No. 16100518, registered office 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE. Support is answered in UK working hours.
Read on
Judge it on what it publishes, not on what it says about itself.
An about page is the company describing itself, which is the least reliable evidence on any website. These are the pages where you can check the claim instead.
- The changelogWhat shipped and when, dated, including the things that were broken and had to be fixed.Read on
- The roadmapWhat is being built next, and which items are an intention with no date on them.Read on
- How BuiltUp comparesAgainst the platforms you are weighing it up with, and against the spreadsheet you use now.Read on
- The guidesHow to price a job in BuiltUp, start to finish, written as the steps rather than as a tour.Read on
- The blogPricing, measurement and where estimates go wrong. Written for people who price work.Read on
- What it costsEvery plan, every limit and every add-on, including what the free plan does not do.Read on
Put it against a job you have already priced.
You know what the answer should be, which makes it the only test worth running.
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