Estimating and tendering systems
Cost models, rates, calculations and bid compilation built around your niche — so pricing a job reuses what you learned on the last one instead of starting from a blank sheet.
What a serious estimating system needs
Rates and price books
Labour, materials, plant and subcontract rates held as data with effective dates, so a price increase is entered once rather than remembered in five places.
Niche calculations
The build-ups specific to your trade, which generic estimating products flatten into categories that do not match how you actually price.
Reusable content
Bids assembled from previous pricing, standard clauses and past technical responses rather than rebuilt from the last similar document.
Scenario pricing
Comparing approaches, sequences or suppliers before committing, with the margin effect of each visible.
Approval and margin rules
Discount limits and margin thresholds that trigger review, so the guardrails live in the system rather than in a policy nobody opens.
Handover to delivery
The winning estimate becoming the budget without re-entry, which is where the original assumptions are most often lost.
Don’t see your challenge here? Talk to us about your project
Most of the value is in the parts that are specific to you
Off-the-shelf estimating handles the common ninety per cent and flattens the ten per cent that makes your pricing yours. That ten per cent is usually where the margin decision actually sits, which is why estimators end up back in a spreadsheet beside the product.
We build around the build-ups that are genuinely yours and integrate the ordinary parts rather than reinventing them. The test is whether the estimator stops keeping a parallel spreadsheet.
- Your build-ups
- Modelled as they are, not flattened to fit.
- Effective dating
- Rate changes entered once, applied from a date.
- Reusable bids
- Assembled from prior pricing and responses.
- Margin guardrails
- Thresholds enforced by the system.
- Assumptions kept
- The basis of the price survives into delivery.
- No parallel sheet
- The measure of whether it actually works.
Tender preparation and order management in one place for ABB
For an ABB factory we brought tender preparation, order management and production planning into a single system, so a bid could be priced and a delivery date committed against real capacity rather than an impression of it.
Common questions
Why not buy an estimating product?
Where your pricing is ordinary, you should, and we will say so. Bespoke earns its cost where the build-ups are specific to your trade — which is usually exactly where the margin decision sits.
Can it use our historic tender data?
Yes, and it should. Prior pricing is the most useful input an estimating system has, and making it searchable and reusable is often the single biggest time saving.
Does the estimate carry through to delivery?
That is the point. The winning estimate becomes the budget with its assumptions intact, so the commercial team is tracking against what was actually priced.
Let's talk about your construction software
Tell us how a job gets priced, won and tracked today, and where the commercial team finds out things too late. We will come back with an honest read on what to build, what to buy, and what a realistic first phase looks like.
