What's new in BuiltUp.

Four things the web app has had for a while, and one thing neither had. Everything below is in version 1.2.0 for iOS and Android.

• Edit an estimate by saying what you want changed. Type it the way you would say it to a person: remove the provisional sums, two plumbers over three days instead of one. It reads the estimate, works out what that means line by line, and shows you the plan with the money against it. Nothing is written until you approve it, and anything it could not do is listed with the reason.
• Every line says where its rate came from. No mark means your own catalogue, your labour roles or a schedule of rates you are let under, which on a healthy estimate is nearly every line. The exceptions are marked: a price read from a named merchant, a figure judged for the job, or a line with no figure at all.
• One screen totting that up in money rather than in lines, ranking what is worth checking by what is at stake, and listing the products your catalogue does not hold.
• Change a trade's days and you are shown every line priced off how long the job is on site, with the money, each one a tick you set. It also tells you when the new duration does not fit the work the line describes. It never blocks you and never changes your number.
• History: every brief the job has been priced from, in full, with what came back. Any of them can be sent back to the generate screen to edit and run again.
• Dark mode works on every screen now rather than most of them, and Auto follows the phone, so a handset that switches itself at dusk switches the app with it. Maps no longer carry a watermark.

Licensing and limits. Preliminaries on the phone defaulted to 17% while the web app has always sent 8, so the same job carried twice the preliminaries on a phone that it carried at a desk. They match now. Arrives as soon as Apple and Google approve the build.

Generating a 33-item schedule used to hold you for about eight minutes, and checking prices with merchants was a large part of that. None of those checks changes which lines exist. So the estimate is handed back as soon as it is written, about six minutes on that same schedule, and the prices carry on being checked behind it.

• A bar above the grid says what is happening while it happens: how many products are left to check, how long it has taken, and roughly how much longer at the rate it is actually going. It says plainly, the whole time, that the estimate below is complete and some material prices may still move.
• Nothing on that bar is invented. The counts come from the server, and the time remaining is derived from the rate already achieved rather than guessed at the start. It simply is not shown until there is a rate to derive it from.
• When the check finishes it says how many lines were repriced from a merchant, and the grid re-reads itself so you are never looking at figures the system no longer holds. If the check cannot finish it says so, and every line keeps the figure it already had.
• Closing the tab does not lose it. The state lives with the job, so reopening the estimate on a phone shows the same answer as the laptop you left it on.

Licensing and limits. The remaining wait is the estimator writing the estimate, not us waiting on merchants. We are working on that separately.

An estimate is a document somebody signs. Until now it presented a price your catalogue produced and a price the estimator judged in exactly the same way, and there was no way to tell which was which. Now there is.

• Every line carries its source. No mark means the rate traces to something you own: a material in your catalogue, one of your labour roles, a schedule of rates you are let under. That is most lines on a healthy estimate, and marking them all would be wallpaper.
• The exceptions are marked, and they are the ones worth five minutes: a price read from a named merchant on a stated date, a figure judged for this job and linked to nothing, or a line with no price at all. The merchant ones carry the supplier, the page and the date it was read.
• A panel behind the chips above the grid totals it in MONEY rather than in lines, which is the number that matters. On one real job 48 of 103 lines carried a judged figure. Under half, which reads like a footnote, and those lines were 55% of the price.
• It then ranks what to check by what is at stake rather than by where it sits in the grid, because checking the top four lines is worth more than checking the other forty.
• And it lists the products your catalogue does not hold, with the money against each. That list is generated from the job. Nobody can recite the products missing from their own catalogue from memory, and every one you add is a line that stops being a judgement and starts being your price.

Licensing and limits. None of this is a quality score. The marks say where a figure came from and nothing about whether it is right. A stale catalogue price is still your catalogue price.

Two contractors gave us schedules they had priced and submitted to their clients: a commercial washroom refurbishment and a salon fit-out, from different firms working different ways. Those became a test that runs the whole system, end to end, and scores the result against what each firm actually charged. Everything below came out of it.

• Labour was being written by a table rather than by the job. Where a schedule said “isolate the circuits and leave safe” (one line, tendered at £130, with the new installation by the client's own nominated contractor), a national minimum wrote eight days of electrician against it. When you hand us your client's schedule, that table now stands down: the document is the scope.
• Every productivity figure the estimator prices labour from was written as a range. Wall tiling 4–6 m² a day. Electrical first fix 8–15 days. A range is honest about the world and useless as an instruction, because the same job priced twice took a different figure out of it each time. They are single numbers now, and an adjustment for a genuinely slower job has to be named on the line.
• Preliminaries were defaulting to 17% for anything that did not set its own, which was never the web app and always the mobile app. They are 8% now, the figure the web app has always sent.
• Products a schedule names without a part number are now priced from real sources. That used to need a code, which is six lines in fifty; a name is how most schedules actually specify, and there were fourteen of those across the two jobs against six codes.
• Loading national rates defaulted to the regional median, offered as “market rate”. That is what trades charge. An estimator prices at what they pay, and against a real London contractor's own rate card the median ran about 30% high on ten of twelve trades. The default is the lower quartile now, and the three options say what they are.

Licensing and limits. Measured on the washroom job against the price that contractor submitted: 240% of it when we started, and 100–112% across runs on their own rates and catalogue. The salon job scores a median error of 6% line by line, with 65 of its 69 items inside 25%. Both schedules are now permanent tests, so neither can quietly slip back.

A lot of work arrives as the client's own schedule of works, with a rate column left empty. You can now price that spreadsheet and send back the same document. Their sections, their item numbers, their wording, in their order, with your figures filled in.

• What you download is their workbook, not a rebuild of it. Column widths, headings, merged cells and whatever layout their surveyor set up are untouched, because only the rate, total and comments cells are written. Formulas they wrote are left alone and recalculate when they open it.
• Their original is never modified. The file you uploaded is kept exactly as it arrived and the priced copy downloads under its own name, so there is no version of the client's document that has quietly changed underneath them.
• A line we could not price is left blank and says so in the comments column, rather than being filled with a guess or dropped from the schedule. Priced lines carry a note showing the materials and labour behind the figure.
• An estimate now opens in one of three views. Estimate is the working grid, rooms, components, markup. Your spec is the same job priced in the structure of the document you uploaded. Compare puts BuiltUp's figure next to your own estimate and next to the final account.
• The two variances are deliberately kept apart. Against your estimate measures our method; against the final account measures how the job actually went. They answer different questions, so they sit side by side and are never averaged into one number. Where a baseline is zero the percentage is left blank rather than reported as nought.
• Figures that appear in the account but nowhere in the specification are listed as variations rather than quietly absorbed.

Licensing and limits. The priced document you get back is an Excel workbook (.xlsx or .xlsm). CSV, OpenDocument and legacy .xls schedules are still read and priced on screen, but only an Excel workbook can be filled in and handed back in its original layout. Check a priced schedule against your own figures before it reaches a client.

Two sources of re-keying removed: the price list a supplier emails you as a PDF, and a specification that had to be described to the takeoff rather than handed to it.

• Import a supplier price list straight from their PDF. Every row is parsed and put in front of you first. The description, unit and price it read, the raw line it came from, and the page it was on. Nothing reaches your catalogue until you confirm the grid.
• Prices are never inferred. A row it could not read a price on comes back empty and flagged, and the import stays blocked until you fill it in, because a wrong price is worse than a missing one. Lines that are not products, page numbers, section headings, the title on the cover, are skipped with the reason shown rather than silently.
• Where a product already exists the price is updated and the previous one kept alongside the date it moved, so a rise is visible rather than overwritten.
• A scanned or photographed price list is refused with an explanation, instead of being half-read into your catalogue.
• Takeoffs now accept a spec or works order alongside the drawings, so the measurement is made against what the client actually asked for. A spec on its own is refused. There is nothing to measure it against.
• Areas measured from the drawings are stored against the job rather than living inside a single takeoff. Later estimates read them, so the same floor stops being 20 m² on one run and 50 m² on the next. A figure you have confirmed yourself is never overwritten by a later measurement.

Drafts a risk assessment and method statement from the trades priced on the job, so the paperwork starts from the work rather than from a template you edit and hope you caught everything in.

• Hazards, who they harm, control measures and 5x5 risk scores are derived from the trades actually on your estimate and the site conditions you declare, occupied premises, pre-2000 building, work at height, public access.
• They are selected, not padded. A job with no electrician gets no electrical hazards, because a risk assessment carrying things that don't apply teaches people to skim the ones that do.
• The method statement, sequence of work, plant, PPE, permits, welfare and emergency arrangements, is written around your scope. If it can't be produced the risk assessment still stands on its own.
• Exports as a PDF with a briefing record and signature lines, because a RAMS nobody signed to say they were briefed on is worth very little afterwards.
• Every document is a DRAFT until a named person approves it, and approving asks who they are and what their role is. Approval locks that version; a later edit raises a new one, so what people were briefed on can always be produced.

Licensing and limits. This drafts the paperwork. It is not health and safety advice, and it does not replace assessment of the conditions actually present on site. Every document must be reviewed, adjusted and approved by a competent person before anyone works to it. Duties under CDM 2015 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 remain with the duty holder.

One press seals everything on a job into a dated record that can't be altered afterwards, and tells you where that record is thin while there is still time to do something about it.

• Gathers your correspondence, changes, contracts, quotes, invoices, documents, photographs, site attendance and programme into one pack, covering the whole job or a period you choose.
• The record is copied into the pack and fingerprinted rather than read live, so editing a message tomorrow doesn't change what a pack sealed today says. The fingerprint is printed on the report and repeated at the foot of every page.
• Tells you what's missing: variations carried out without written approval, approved changes with no agreed cost, no signed contract, no photographs. These are found by rule rather than written by the AI, so they don't depend on a good day.
• Writes a neutral chronology of what happened and when, and sets out the points where the two sides visibly disagree.
• Exports two ways: the report on its own as a PDF, or a ZIP holding that PDF alongside every original photograph and document, each with its own checksum so a single image can be verified on its own. Anything too large to include is listed with the reason rather than left out silently.

Licensing and limits. Dispute Shield gathers your record and identifies where it is incomplete. It is not legal advice, takes no view on the merits of a dispute, and does not determine liability. It can only seal what it holds, anything agreed by telephone or in person is not captured, and a pack will say so rather than imply the record is complete.

Plenty of work arrives as a schedule of works rather than a drawing: thirty numbered items, a quantity against each, and a rate column left empty for you to fill. You can now hand that document over as it is and get a priced estimate back in your own numbering.

• Upload the spec itself, XLSX, XLS, ODS or CSV, alongside your plans. It is read as a document, with the item numbering, sub-items and quantities intact, rather than flattened into prose. Previously anything that wasn't a drawing or a photo was ignored without a word, so a spec could be attached and quietly contribute nothing.
• Set your labour rate and material markup once, in Settings under Financial Defaults, and estimates price at your figures. Before this, a job needing a trade your labour library didn't hold was priced from a general trade card, which is wrong for any firm that pays its own people a known rate.
• Choose how labour is priced: split by trade from your library, or everything at a single standard rate. A firm working to one rate can now get an estimate it can check line by line against its own costings.
• Any measurement the estimate had to assume is now declared instead of buried. Surveyed plans carry floor areas and no ceiling heights, so wall areas, tiling and decoration were being priced off a number nobody supplied. The estimate now says what it assumed, and reprices the moment you enter the real figure.
• A file we still can't read is named as unread rather than dropped in silence.

A round of fixes across signup, the takeoff analyser and estimate variations, and the first set of step-by-step guides in Help & Support.

• Your currency now follows the country you work in. A business in the UK was being set up in dollars: the country was captured at signup but never reached the currency, signing up with Google or Apple recorded no country at all, and the currency picked during onboarding was discarded before it was saved. Changing your billing country now moves the currency with it. Existing accounts affected by this have been corrected.
• A large set of drawings no longer fails to analyse. Ten PDFs at once could add up to more than a single request can carry, and the upload died with a network error rather than anything you could act on. Pages are now budgeted across the whole set, so every drawing you upload is looked at, and if there is more than one run can cover, it says so instead of failing.
• A variation with priced work in it can now be deleted. Deleting one worked only while it was empty, anything holding rooms and costed items stopped with a database error.
• An account moved onto a plan by our support team no longer shows a countdown for a trial it isn't on, and can no longer be dropped back to Free when that old trial date passes.
• Saved takeoffs are named for what you asked for, or the drawings they came from, rather than a fragment of text lifted out of the PDF.
• Help & Support now carries step-by-step guides for changing your currency, setting up your branding, and recording a licence and importing a rate schedule.

Choosing Google or Apple without an existing account dropped you straight into the product, in a workspace named after your first name with a generated web address. The one your clients see. You had skipped the part of setup that makes it yours.

• An account created this way now completes registration first: your business name and your workspace address, with your Google or Apple identity already attached so nothing is typed twice.
• Existing accounts are unaffected and are never asked to set up again.

Variations let you price the same job more than one way. A client option, an alternate specification, a change order. Two things about them were wrong.

• Generating with a variation selected put the work in the main estimate and left the variation empty, because rooms were matched by name across the whole project rather than within the version you were working in.
• Variations can now be deleted. One with a quote already issued to the client is kept, so a quote they are holding can't lose the scope it was priced against.

A fortnight of work on the beta, most of it about the same thing: a job priced against a schedule now reads as one everywhere, not just where it is coded.

• Estimates, the summary, forecasts, the overview and the quote all price schedule lines correctly. Codes, base rates and the contract adjustment are shown, and markup and waste, which don't apply to an all-in rate, are not.
• Quotes carry a priced schedule: every measured item with its code, quantity and adjusted rate, so a works order can be reconciled line by line.
• Quantities are measured from the drawing rather than estimated, room and elevation schedules are read directly, so wall areas, skirting runs and external faces are computed rather than guessed.
• A works order is answered line for line, in its own numbering, in the schedule's wording.
• Site photos on a term contract come back coded, with the schedule in front of the model at the point the defect is identified.
• If a job is on a contract but priced from build-ups anyway, the estimate says so instead of quietly looking finished.

Licensing and limits. BuiltUp supplies no rate data. Published schedules are commercially licensed and you bring your own, under your own licence, having confirmed it permits loading into third-party software. Still in beta on Ultimate, check a priced schedule against your own figures before it reaches a client.

Small things that undermine trust at exactly the wrong moment.

• The client portal no longer shows internal pipeline stages. A project isn't described to your customer as a "lead", and every status now reads from their side of the job.
• Sending a quote tells you what actually happened, naming the version and who it went to. A send that failed used to report success, and a save that failed reported nothing at all.
• Sending a quote moves the project to Proposal Sent, so the pipeline and the client's own status line stop describing a stage that has passed.

Price measured term work against your own schedule of rates instead of building every line up from materials and labour. Built for contractors working to a published or bespoke term-contract schedule for housing associations, local authorities and NHS trusts.

• Import your schedule from Excel, OpenDocument or CSV. Column mapping is suggested and shown against real rows before anything is written.
• Create a term contract carrying your agreed percentage adjustment, positive uplift or tendered discount, and bind a job to it.
• Estimates generated on a bound job are written in the schedule's own wording and coded as they are built, rather than priced and reconciled afterwards.
• Code lookup is filtered by unit, so a square-metre measurement can't be priced against a per-item code.
• Adjusted rates are shown alongside the published base rate, so the uplift is always auditable.
• Reissued editions import as a new schedule alongside the old one. Quotes already raised keep the rate, unit and edition they were priced at.

Licensing and limits. BuiltUp supplies no rate data. Published schedules are commercially licensed and you bring your own, under your own licence, having confirmed it permits loading into third-party software. This release is in beta and still being refined against live term contracts, always check a priced schedule against your own figures before it reaches a client.

Registration was losing people in the middle. It's now three steps, identity, verification, workspace, with plan and payment moved out of signup entirely, so you land in the product on the free plan and choose a plan when you've seen what it does.

• Plan selection and card details no longer block account creation.
• "Try a sample project" was failing silently for some accounts and now reports what went wrong instead of appearing to do nothing.
• The demo project seeds a realistic job end to end, change orders, client messages, finish selections and progress, rather than an empty shell.

Material prices track your suppliers rather than sitting stale in the price book. When a tracked product moves, the estimate reflects it and you're told which lines changed.

Measure, define and forecast from the phone, not just the desktop.

• Takeoffs: measure, count and quantify materials directly in the app.
• Scope of works: define project boundaries before ground is broken, so crews, clients and subs are working to the same document.
• Overrun forecasting: potential cost overruns are flagged early, before they eat the margin.
• Project summary views: project health, timelines and budgets in one place.

Upload a scaled drawing or a set of site photos and get measured quantities back, room by room, with a confidence grade on every measurement so you can see what to check before it prices.

• Works from PDF plan sets and from photographs.
• Measurements group by room and trade, and drop into the estimate rather than needing re-keying.
• Every quantity carries a HIGH, MEDIUM or LOW confidence grade.

A block of work across reporting, integrations and the estimate assistant.

• Work-in-progress reports: what's earned, what's billed and what's still to invoice across live jobs.
• Xero and QuickBooks fixes: token refresh on a stale connection, and the client is pushed ahead of the invoice so it has a contact to hang on.
• Activity logs record what actually changed on a job, not just that something did.
• The AI scope assistant produces tighter scopes and no longer creates duplicate labour roles for the same trade.
• Responsive fixes across the dashboard and the guides.

A live view of every active site, and more control over how the AI builds a scope.

• Site Operations: who's clocked in, who's missing, which materials are delayed and which sites are burning margin, live.
• Scope generation can be switched between Partial, using only your existing catalogue, and Full Buildout, which generates every room, trade and material at industry rates.
• Performance improvements, and a fix for the quote builder not pulling material names added from the web app.

The parts of a job that cost money when they slip, available on site.

• Contracts with e-signatures, sent and signed from the app.
• Change orders, and finish selections.
• AI Schedule Guard.

A month of releases building the app out from the launch version.

• AI Scheduler and Weather Guard.
• Quick invoicing, and a materials overhaul.
• Dashboard overhaul with project detail, auto-reminders and purchase order tracking.
• Expanded client and labour detail, map view, improved notifications and streamlined quotes.

The mobile apps launched on the App Store and Google Play, projects, clients, scope building, quotes and messages, built for use on site rather than as a cut-down companion.

• Scope building reworked for touch, so a room can be priced from a phone.
• In-app subscriptions on iOS.