Building a scope manually
When you'd rather build a scope from scratch — or edit what the AI gave you — here's how the scope editor actually works: rooms, components, quantities, waste factors, and the material search.
- • A project open on Scope → Estimate with an empty (or nearly empty) scope
- • Your labor roles and a few materials set up (Settings → Labor Roles, Settings → Suppliers)
AI scope generation gets you most of the way there on most jobs, but sometimes you want to build a scope from scratch or tune an AI-generated one line by line. The scope editor is designed for that — it's a spreadsheet-style room-and-component view where everything you add shows up in real time on your totals and your Good/Better/Best tiers.
Add your first room
On an empty scope, click Room in the toolbar. A new blank room appears with a name, dimension fields (length, width, height), and an empty component list.
Rename the room — "Kitchen", "Master Bathroom", "Project Extras" — and fill in the dimensions if you know them. BuiltUp uses length × width to auto-calculate floor and wall areas so when you add flooring or paint, the quantity is prefilled.
If you don't have dimensions yet, leave them blank — you can type quantities directly on each component.
Add materials from your price book
Inside a room, click + Material. A search modal opens with four tabs across the top:
- Price book — search your existing materials by name. Fastest for things you quote often.
- Supplier search — live price lookup from Travis Perkins, Wickes, Screwfix and others. Use this when you need a current market price.
- SKU lookup — paste in a product code and BuiltUp fetches the spec, image, and price.
- Manual — when you've got a supplier quote in front of you and just need to type it in.
Start with Price book. If you don't find what you need, jump to Supplier search — any material you find there gets saved to your price book automatically so you won't have to search again next time.
Search your price book
Set quantity, unit and waste factor
Every component row has five things that matter:
- Quantity — how many of this material you need. If your room has dimensions, BuiltUp prefills quantities for floor-area, wall-area, and perimeter items.
- Unit — m², linear metres, items, hours, days. Match the unit to how your supplier prices it.
- Unit price — pulled from your price book or supplier search; editable if you negotiated a better rate.
- Waste factor — a percentage added on top (standard is 10% for most materials, 15% for tiles, 5% for timber). This protects you from coming up short mid-job.
- Markup — percentage added to the cost to get the price you show the client. Set workspace-wide or per-project; can be overridden per item.
You don't need to think about these every time — BuiltUp applies sensible defaults from your workspace settings. Only edit when the job is unusual.
Add labour for every install
A scope that has only materials is incomplete — the client needs to know what it costs to install the thing, not just buy it. For every material you add, add a corresponding labour line by clicking + Labor in the same row.
Labour uses your labor roles from Settings. Pick the role (Carpenter, Electrician, Plasterer, etc.), pick a unit (usually DAY), and enter how many days that trade needs in that room.
A rule of thumb: if the material quantity is 28 square metres of flooring, the labour quantity is usually 2-3 days for a flooring installer. The AI gets this right automatically; when you're building manually you have to think about it yourself.
Use the Good/Better/Best tier switcher
At the top right of the scope tab there's a tier toggle showing three prices: Good, Better, Best. BuiltUp automatically generates three versions of your scope with different material tiers — entry-level, mid-range, and premium — and the labour stays the same.
Flip between them to see the total shift. When you send a quote, you can choose which tier the client sees — or send all three and let them pick. Clients love having the choice; it makes you look consultative instead of expensive.
You control the tier pricing per material from Settings → Suppliers, or you can override it on any individual scope line.
Manual scope building isn't something most people do every day — it's what you reach for when the AI got something wrong, when the job is so bespoke there's nothing to generate from, or when you're building your first template. The editor is designed to stay out of your way: one room, one row at a time, and your totals stay live.
Using the AI Takeoff Analyzer
Upload plans and BuiltUp extracts measurements, counts and areas — with a confidence score on every line so you know what to trust. Then push the ones you're happy with straight into your scope.
More in Estimating
The three-stage estimating flow (Takeoff → Scope → Estimate)
BuiltUp splits estimating into three linked stages the way professional estimators actually work. Here's what each stage is for, how they flow into each other, and why running them separately gets you tighter quotes and fewer disputes.
Creating your first project
Projects are the container for everything BuiltUp does — scope, quotes, invoices, files, messages. This guide walks you through creating one, understanding the status workflow, and knowing what to fill in now vs. later.
Generating a scope with AI
Upload a set of plans, write a one-line brief, and BuiltUp's AI Scope Architect builds a full priced scope — rooms, materials, labour, waste factors. Here's how to get the most out of it.
Using the AI Takeoff Analyzer
Upload plans and BuiltUp extracts measurements, counts and areas — with a confidence score on every line so you know what to trust. Then push the ones you're happy with straight into your scope.