Hard and soft landscaping · External works · Groundworks
Areas, linear metres, and a forecast that decides your week.
A landscape plan gives you areas by finish and boundaries in metres. The two things a drawing is genuinely good for. Then the job goes outside, where the programme you wrote on Friday meets the rain that arrives on Tuesday. BuiltUp prices the first and re-plans the second.
No card. Three takeoffs on the free plan, enough to price a garden you have already built and see where the muck-away lands.
How the job reaches you
A plan with areas on it, or a phone full of a very overgrown garden.
On the designed jobs you get a landscape plan: setting out, levels, finishes by zone, planting schedule. That is the best possible input, because your work is measured in square metres of finish and linear metres of boundary and both of those are on the drawing.
On everything else you get a walk round. And for this trade the honest position is the same as for a decorator: a photograph shows condition, not dimensions. It will count the fence panels and it will tell you the patio is failing, but it will not give you an area from a picture of a lawn. What it will do is hand you the list of measurements it needs, phrased as questions you could ask someone standing there, with the value it assumed in the meantime.
Upload the landscape plan, or the photographs
A PDF plan with a text layer is read as a drawing, with scaled geometry used where it is present. Photographs go in as photographs, up to 24 a run, and are treated as evidence of condition rather than as a source of measurements.
External works measured as areas, metres and loads
Patio, path and driveway areas by finish. Boundary walls and fencing in linear metres. Turfing, planting and topsoil by area. External drainage, gullies and channel drains. Making good to the garden after the works. And skips and waste removal counted as loads, which on this trade is not a rounding error.
The groundworks underneath it, if the job needs it
Where the drawings run to it: site strip, excavation volume and muck-away loads, trench fill or strip footings in linear metres with a depth, hardcore, blinding, DPM and slab by area, and new drainage runs, inspection chambers, soakaways and the connection to existing. Excavation is the item most likely to be under-priced, and it comes back as a volume rather than as a feeling.
Then the programme takes the forecast into account
This is the part nobody else on this list needs. The schedule guard pulls the local forecast for the site postcode, works out which tasks are genuinely outdoor, and re-plans those around the bad days, writing a note onto every task it moved so you can see what it did and why. Indoor tasks are skipped rather than swept up with everything else. There is a dry-run mode, so you can look at the proposed re-plan before accepting it.
Photograph the plot on the visit, or type what you agreed while standing in it, and the scope comes back written up against your own materials and labour, with anything that still needs a tape named rather than guessed.
What an external works package contains.
The external works walk, plus the groundworks below it where the job goes that deep.
- Patio, path and driveway areas by finish
- Boundary walls and fencing in linear metres
- Turfing, planting and topsoil areas
- External drainage, gullies and channel drains
- Making good to garden and site after the works
- Skips and waste removal, by number of loads
- Site strip, excavation volume and muck-away loads
- Trench fill or strip footings, in linear metres with a depth
- Hardcore, sand blinding, DPM, insulation and concrete by area
- Below-DPC blockwork, inspection chambers, soakaways
- Connection to existing drainage
- Repair path or step, renew gate, repair fence panel or post
- Garden clearance, hedge and tree cut-back on housing work
- Access equipment with a duration, and parking, permits and ULEZ where the location implies it
Landscaper and Fencing Installer are separate roles in the labour library, as are Groundworker and Drainage Engineer, so a job that needs three of them is not priced at one blended day rate.
The three that matter when the job is outdoors.
One of these exists on no other page in this set, and it is the reason this trade has its own.
- A programme that reads the forecastAI re-planning on Pro · timeline on every plan
- Tasks are created per trade with planned dates and a progress percentage, viewable by week, month, list or timeline. The guard then checks the weather against the site location, identifies the outdoor tasks, and re-plans around rain, leaving the indoor work alone. Every moved task carries a note recording why. It is the difference between a programme that goes stale in week two and one that tells you on Sunday night.
- Deliveries that fail change the planOrders on Basic and above
- Purchase orders come off the priced materials, grouped by supplier, and are receipted per item with delayed and incorrect as proper states. A pallet of setts that has not turned up feeds straight into the same re-plan as the weather does, rather than being a text message you remember on Thursday.
- Rates for the four trades this actually takes
- Landscaper, Fencing Installer, Groundworker and Drainage Engineer all ship as separate UK day rates, low, mid and high, across twelve regions with a location index applied. Load them, then replace them with yours. Your own stated rate always beats the model's figure, and your edits are never overwritten.
What it will not do for you.
- It will not give you an area from a photograph.
- A picture of a garden is not a measurement of a garden. Counts it will do. Areas need the plan, a tape or a wheel. It tells you which areas it needs and what it assumed while it waited, which is the useful version of not knowing.
- It does not know your ground.
- Nothing in it surveys, tests or infers what is under the turf. Excavation is priced from the volume the drawings imply. Rock, made ground, a services strike or a water table are risks you price and it does not, and where the evidence hints at a hidden problem it raises an open question rather than a rate.
- It has no planting knowledge.
- It will price a planting area and a topsoil depth. It will not specify a species, check a plant against the soil or tell you what will survive a north-facing bed. That is not what it is.
- The weather re-plan needs Pro.
- Creating and tracking the tasks and viewing the timeline works on every plan, including Free. The automatic build and the automatic re-plan around the forecast are on Pro and above.
Questions this comes with.
- Where does the forecast come from?
- A public forecast API, queried against the site's location, returning a daily weather code that is checked against a list of conditions that stop outdoor work. It is a forecast, with everything that implies. It is there to make the programme less wrong on Monday, not to be right about a fortnight on Thursday.
- Most of our work is domestic gardens with no drawing at all.
- Then you are in the same position as a decorator, and the page says the same thing: photographs give you condition and counts, not areas. Take the plan or the tape to the six things it flags and the estimate firms up. Where you do get a designed scheme, the plan is a strong input and the areas come straight off it.
- Can I use it for the groundworks package on a house as well?
- Yes. Pick residential and the walk runs substructure and superstructure alongside external works, excavation volume, muck-away loads, footings, slab build-up, drainage runs and the connection to existing. It is the same estimate; the sector choice just changes which categories it walks.
Price a garden you have already built.
You know what the muck-away came to. See whether it does.
No card. Three takeoffs and three AI estimates, both lifetime totals.
Or set it up with us, 30 minutes, screen-shared