Cost it with a click

You've seen them advertised. You've spoken to the reps. You've even run the demo. But you just can't make up your mind which estimating software will suit your business.

I road-tested three products, targeted mainly at smaller building firms. For an outlay of between £200 and £600, they let you produce estimates for clients, bills of quantities, separate cost reports for labour, materials, plant and subcontractors. Each program has at its core a database of building prices derived from price books such as Hutchins, Griffiths, Spons and Laxtons. Prices are net and can be edited to take account of local conditions, markup/profit and on-costs.

Let's be honest: bills of quantities are not much use to contractors once they have been manually priced. On the other hand, if the all-in rates are entered electronically into a bill of quantities, they can be analysed in terms of elements (work up to damp-proof coursing, external walls and roof, and so on) with l1ists of materials, labour content and plant produced as a spin-off. An otherwise sterile BQ now becomes a valuable and versatile tool for planning labour requirements, purchasing materials and cost control.

Each product has been assessed on the basis of ease of use, quality of its priced library, job reports and value for money.

ESTIMATOR 2.5
To try out Estimator, go to Masterbill's website and order a free working copy. It won't print out until you've stumped up your £295, but you will be able to discover whether it's what you are looking for.

The big advantage of Estimator is its comprehensive library of priced items. An extremely useful alterations section includes a cost database that should make life easier for builders specialising in repair and maintenance. Items costed range from demolishing buildings to repointing.

Starting from scratch isn't a problem. A good tutorial gives early confidence and novices will soon be producing their own priced bills. Watch out, though, for a mysterious 'adjustment factor', which is a percentage the software adds to rates to bring them up to today's prices. This clumsy feature gets in the way of other uplifts you must add to cover overheads and profit.

The worst feature of the program is the tiresome way in which it forces you to select items for billing. You need to go through several levels of selection to reach, say, a description for brick walls in facings. Enter it and you then have to trawl through each of the main headings again to reach the same description, but this time for brickwork pointed on both sides.

Resource analysis clearly displays labour, plant and materials, and each can be viewed separately. However, changing the supply price of, say, sand or cement simply isn't possible, as the rates included are for mixed mortar.

Still, modifying straightforward materials and labour prices could not be easier and the waste factors are effortlessly amended. BQs or estimates are printed in either priced or unpriced format. The problem is, though, that the print-out contains a rate analysis, which is normally confidential information and therefore needs to be switched off for most purposes.

Price: £295 plus VAT
System requirements: Windows 95/98/NT, Pentium PC with minimum 32MB of RAM
Telephone: 01727 855563
Fax: 01727 854626
Website: www.masterbill.com

FAST ESTIMATE PLUS 5
Although you can download a free working copy of Fast Estimate Plus 5 via the internet, you won't be able to print or access all its features. This is a shame given that the program is equipped with some excellent features, such as a very sharp rate build-up editing dialog box. Materials, waste, labour and profit can all be instantly accessed and amended. The dimension input dialog box also comes with a useful annotation column.

Some library items, such as alterations, roofing, formwork and finishes, are very limited. The product still desperately needs a simplified interface and more intuitive menus. As it stands, it is difficult and time-consuming to find the item you want to bill or price.

The program also badly needs what has become the industry-standard method of input and sorting based on Standard Method of Measurement 7. Nothing is such a terrible waste of time as having to arrange or rearrange items of work manually – it almost defeats the object of using a computer.

Once you are up and running with how the program works, though, Fast Estimate Plus will let you produce clear and professional-looking estimates and materials lists, which are ideally suited to the needs of jobbing builders. However, the previous version of Fast Estimate Plus, which is still being advertised by Estek at £199, represents better value for money than version 5.

Price: £299 including VAT (previous version still available at £199)
System requirements: Windows 95/98/NT, Pentium PC with minimum 32MB of RAM
Telephone: 01764 655331
Fax: 01764 655441
Website: www.estek.co.uk

CONTENDER 2.2
This program is a big investment. But despite the £595 price tag, Contender 2.2 represents good value, allowing you space to grow. On a simple level, it will not produce priced bills any more effectively than its competitors reviewed here, but once you become confident about choosing items from its extensive library, you will begin to discover its power and effectiveness.

Like Estimator 2.5, Contender offers a good tutorial that will soon have you producing impressive results, but its killer advantage comes in the shape of a mostly priced set of preliminary items. Covering on-site overheads with a 10% addition to the contract sum is an emergency measure only. But with prelims neatly set out and asking to be priced, this is good estimating and management practice.

Amending the price of raw materials such as cement is smooth and uncomplicated. Click on the rate build-up icon for, say, site mix concrete and a series of dialog boxes leads you to the supply price of cement, which you can tailor to your own purchasing contract.

The next big step forward is the quality and variety of printed reports. These include a cost summary, priced BQ and resource lists of labour, plant and materials. There is even a useful additions and omissions format, and one for percentage complete, which can be used to value variations. A disappointing omission is a preview print facility.

Contender is intuitive and engaging. It understands its users: builders who need to save time and wish to develop greater estimating accuracy. A major update of Contender is imminent but buying version 2.2 now will assure you of a free update to version 3 on its release.

Price: £595 plus VAT
System requirements: Windows 95/98/NT, Pentium PC with minimum 16MB of RAM
Telephone: 020 8805 8704
Fax: 020 8443 5828
Website: www.snape-software.co.uk

VERDICT
All the software reviewed here will provide good, professional-looking estimates with analysis of the rate build-ups.

The key to a good estimating package is the ease and flexibility with which it lets you tailor prices. With the cheaper packages you have to put more time and effort into building up your own rates and creating bespoke items. What all of them need, however, is a good composite rate section, which allows designers and builders to provide clients with budget figures very quickly.

If cost is more important to you than time, then Fast Estimate Plus and Estimator can be bent to suit your needs. But Contender is the best product for generating an accurate estimate, which is, after all, the only one worth tendering.