One house, one client, and a set of drawings they have already fallen in love with.

How the job reaches you

Drawings and a spec, and a client who is not a quantity surveyor.

A custom build arrives as a drawing set, plans, elevations, sections, sometimes a structural engineer's calculations, plus a specification written by the architect and a client who has never read a bill of quantities in their life. You are not tendering against a schedule someone else has already itemised. You are producing the itemisation, and then you are explaining it.

That makes two demands at once. The measurement has to be defensible, because it becomes the contract sum. And the document has to be legible to somebody who is spending their own money, because they will read it, line by line, twice.

1. 01

   Upload the set and pick residential

   The residential walk is a different walk. It runs substructure, superstructure, roofing, internal fabric, kitchens and bathrooms, mechanical, electrical, insulation and airtightness, and external works, and it always opens a preliminaries group, because welfare, skips, scaffold, protection and the final clean are real money on a one-off house and are the first things a builder forgets to price.

2. 02

   It labels the work in plain English as well as the technical term

   Homeowners read these numbers, so the residential mode is instructed to write labels a client can follow alongside the trade term. Where the plans show existing against proposed, only the proposed works are measured and what is retained is noted, which is the single most common way an extension estimate gets double-counted.

3. 03

   The things that are not measurable come back as questions

   Building Control, Party Wall and planning-condition items are raised as open questions rather than measured rows. Structural alterations automatically carry a temporary propping and structural engineer allowance. And it returns a list of the measurements someone needs to go and take on site, each written as a question you could ask a person, with the value it assumed in the meantime.

4. 04

   The estimate becomes the contract, then the record

   A Homeowner Contract, a Home Renovation Agreement or a JCT-style Minor Works or Intermediate template is drafted from the job, sent for signature and signed in the browser. From then on, finish selections, variations and invoices all hang off the same figures.

The four that matter on a private job.

A custom build is not lost on the measurement. It is lost between the handshake and the final account.

Good, better, best on the same line

Where a catalogue match exists, the estimate can carry alternative specifications against an item with your margin shown at each. The client chooses; the quote reprices. It is the honest way to have the worktop conversation once rather than five times.

Finish selections the client makes themselves

Cabinetry, worktops, splashbacks, flooring, paint colours, lighting, fixtures, ironmongery, appliances, window treatments. You set out at least two named options with an image or a swatch and a price impact, and a due date. They pick in their own portal. It moves from awaiting to selected to confirmed to locked, and once it is locked it is on the record with a date against it.

Contracts a homeowner will actually sign

21 templates, including a Homeowner Contract with and without a consultant, a Home Renovation Agreement, and JCT-style Minor Works, Intermediate and Design & Build wording. Edit the clauses, send it, and the signature is captured in the browser with the signer's name, the time, and their IP address, all written to the audit log. It is signature capture with an audit trail, not a qualified electronic signature. Say so if a solicitor asks.

Every extra priced before it is builtPro

A client message asking for something outside the agreed scope is flagged, and becomes a priced variation with a cost, a client price and a schedule impact that they approve in the portal. Approved, it writes into the estimate and can be invoiced from there. Nobody has the "but you said" conversation about a wall that has already moved.

Questions this comes with.

We build two or three houses a year, not twenty. Is this worth it?

Two or three houses a year is two or three tenders where being wrong costs you the year. The free plan gives you one active project, three takeoffs and three AI estimates, lifetime, not monthly, which is enough to price a house you have already built and compare it against what it actually cost you. That is the only test that tells you anything.

Our clients want a fixed price. Does this give me one?

It gives you a priced document you can turn into a fixed price once you have checked it. Every measurement is graded high, medium or low confidence and the things it could not determine come back as open questions with the measurements someone needs to take on site. What you must not do is send the first output as a quote. An estimate is a guideline and a quote is fixed. The distinction is legal, not stylistic, and it is on you either way.

Can the client see the whole thing?

Only what you show them. The portal is enabled per project, can be password protected, and has separate switches for whether the client sees the budget and whether they see reference codes. They get the quote, the contract, their finish selections, progress, variations and invoices. Not your margin, unless you turn that on.