Plumbing · Heating · Gas · Reactive
Three different jobs, and you price all three before Friday.
A bathroom with a specification. A boiler swap you looked at on Tuesday. A leak somebody rang about this morning that is one line and needs an answer in an hour. They are not the same estimating problem, and BuiltUp does not pretend they are. A five-photograph call-out should produce a handful of rows, not fifty.
No card. Three takeoffs on the free plan, enough to price a bathroom you have already done and check it against what it cost.
How the job reaches you
Photographs of a plant room, or a bathroom, or a stain on a ceiling.
You almost never get a drawing. You get a look under a bath, a photograph of a boiler and its flue, a cylinder cupboard, or a damp patch that somebody wants a price on. The document does not exist yet. You are the one who has to make it.
BuiltUp's photograph mode is written for exactly that input, and the first thing it does is refuse to overreach. It counts what can be counted: radiators, sanitaryware, valves. It estimates only against something visible with a known size, and says which reference it used. And it separates the symptom from the cause, which on this trade is the whole game: a stained ceiling is a symptom, and the roof, the seal or the pipe above is the cause. It will price making good what it can see and raise investigating the cause as an open question, rather than pricing a repair to something it cannot.
Photograph it, or talk it through
Up to 24 photographs a run straight off the phone. Or narrate the visit and it transcribes the audio into the brief. On a planned bathroom or a full heating install with a drawing, upload the drawing instead. It will read it as a drawing and use the scaled geometry where the set carries it.
It writes what it can see, per photograph
One observation per shot, in order, with a condition rating of good, fair, poor or defective and the works that shot evidences. Nothing skipped, and no defect invented to fill an entry. Every item in an observation must reappear as its own priced row. The observations are the evidence, the works list is the orderable schedule.
The depth matches the job
A reactive visit produces three to fifteen rows. A void property or a full stock-condition survey produces thirty to eighty. It is explicitly instructed not to pad, because a short accurate schedule is the correct output for a small repair and a padded one destroys the trust of whoever reads it.
Priced against your rates, with the gaps named
Materials from your catalogue, labour at your own day rate. Plumber and Gas Engineer (Gas Safe) are two separate roles in the rate library, so a job needing both is not priced at one blended figure. Anything it could not size comes back as one item with "quantity to be confirmed on site", plus a list of the measurements to take, each phrased as a question with the value it assumed in the meantime.
“While you're there…”, in writing. BuiltUp reads the client's own message, flags the part of it that falls outside the agreed scope, and turns that part into something priced and approved before anyone lifts a tool.
The heating, plumbing and gas walk.
These are the items it works through on planned work, and beneath them the reactive lines it produces on a call-out or a housing repair.
- Boiler: type, output, and whether it is a replacement or a relocation
- Radiators counted with size, plus TRVs
- Underfloor heating zones by area, and manifold count
- Hot and cold distribution pipework, first fix and second fix
- Cylinder or unvented store where shown
- Soil and vent pipe, waste runs to each fixture
- Gas run to boiler and hob, noted as a Gas Safe requirement
- System flush, commissioning and Benchmark certificate
- Bathroom suites: WC, basin, bath, tray, enclosure, screen. One row each
- Shower valve, thermostatic mixer, towel radiator
- Wall and floor tiling by area, plus tanking to wet areas
- Extract ventilation to each wet room
- Reactive: renew tap, washer, flexi, trap, stop tap or ball valve
- Reactive: clear blockage, repair leak, renew WC pan or cistern
- Reactive: repair or renew radiator, renew TRV, bleed and balance
- Reactive: boiler repair or renew, thermostat, system flush
- Cap off water as a make-safe item, and temporary washing facilities if needed
On damp and mould work it runs a separate walk against Awaab's Law and the HHSRS: extent of visible mould by room, the suspected cause where it can be evidenced, mould wash and stain block, the ventilation remedy, extract renewal, PIV, trickle vents, humidistat fan, and moisture monitoring where a permanent repair should wait. It flags explicitly where something presents as a Category 1 hazard with statutory timescales attached.
The three that matter on this trade.
Chosen for a firm that does planned work, reactive work and housing work out of the same van.
- Two rates, not one blended one
- Plumber and Gas Engineer (Gas Safe) are separate roles in the labour library, each with a low, mid and high UK day rate across twelve regions with a location index applied. A boiler swap that needs a Gas Safe engineer for half a day and a plumber for a day and a half prices as those two things, which is how you actually pay for it.
- Merchant price lists in from the PDF
- Import the list your merchant emailed. Every row is previewed with high, medium or low confidence and the raw source line it came from, and nothing is written until you confirm the grid. A row whose price cannot be read blocks the import rather than being guessed at. A wrong price becomes a rate on an estimate and then a number in front of a customer.
- Term work priced to the schedule you were issuedUltimate · Beta
- If you hold a housing contract, import your own NSR, M3NHF or in-house schedule and bind the job to a term contract carrying your agreed uplift or discount. Coded lines price at the scheduled rate with the published base rate shown beside the adjusted one. An SOR rate is never run through the markup engine, because the schedule already deems it to include labour, oncosts, materials, wastage, access, non-productive time, overheads and profit.
What it will not do for you.
- It does not notify Gas Safe or produce an LGSR.
- It prices the gas run, the commissioning and the Benchmark certificate as work. It does not issue a Landlord Gas Safety Record, does not hold your appliance register and does not submit a Building Regulations notification. Nobody should be selling you software that claims to.
- It cannot see inside a system.
- Pipe runs under floors, the state of a heat exchanger, whether that cylinder is actually vented: none of that is in a photograph. Where the evidence points at a hidden defect, it raises the investigation rather than pricing the fix.
- You supply the schedule and the licence.
- BuiltUp ships no rate data. You already hold the schedule. Your client issued it with the contract. What you may not have is permission to load it into software, which is a separate question and one worth asking them before you import. The import is blocked until a licence is recorded.
- It is not a call-out dispatch system.
- No engineer diary, no round-robin allocation, no customer SMS on the way. Programme tasks are per project. If your business runs on a dispatch board, this sits next to it rather than replacing it.
Questions this comes with.
- Half my work is one-line call-outs. Is this overkill?
- For a tap washer, yes, and you should say so. Where it earns its place is the jobs in between. A bathroom, a boiler with the flue in an awkward spot, a repair where the extent is not obvious, and the housing work, where the schedule and the priority coding matter and the write-up is the slow part. It is instructed to keep a small repair small rather than turning it into a document.
- What is the difference between the reactive mode and the normal one?
- Pick local authority or social housing as the sector and the whole output changes shape. One row per orderable repair, worded verb-first the way a schedule of rates words it, each opening with EMERGENCY, URGENT or ROUTINE. Items that are plainly tenant damage rather than fair wear and tear are noted, because it changes who is recharged. Asbestos is never priced. It is raised as needing a refurbishment and demolition survey.
- Do I need to load my materials first?
- No. Plumber and Gas Safe day rates for your region load with one button and there is a starter set of common materials. You can also run in price-book-only mode, which uses nothing but your own rates and prices nothing it cannot find. That is useful once your catalogue is real, and honest about the gaps while it is not.
Photograph the last bathroom you did.
You know what it cost. See what comes back, and read what it says it could not see.
No card. Three takeoffs and three AI estimates, both lifetime totals.
Or set it up with us, 30 minutes, screen-shared