Monday morning, in the inbox: the bill of quantities from the landscape architect. 80 positions, each with its number, short text, long text, quantity and unit – and two empty columns for unit price and total. Priced and back by Friday. Until now that meant retyping, calculating in Excel, sending it back. Since this autumn Bautimer reads the bill of quantities in.
What happens on import
You upload the file – a GAEB file (X83) or the PDF exactly as it came from the planner. Bautimer reads the titles and positions from it: number, short and long text, quantity, unit, and whether a position is normal, an alternative or an optional one. Then comes the step only you can do: every position is mapped to a service from your own catalogue. Bautimer proposes the matching service and remembers every confirmed mapping: when the same short text returns in the next bill, the service is already filled in. A mapping is only offered when the unit matches – a square metre stays a square metre.
The price proposal follows from the mapping: the service's cost rate from your catalogue plus your surcharges. You see the derivation and can override the offered unit price per position. If a service is missing from the catalogue you create it right from the review, or make a variant of an existing one. A position may also stay without a calculation basis – then you type the price, and the position is marked as such on the site and in the quote, without job costing.
One click at the end creates everything at once: the site with its positions, the titles of the bill as position groups, the quote, and the original file as a site document. Hourly-rate work becomes day-work positions with the hours from the bill; alternative and optional positions are priced but do not count towards the total.
Back to the planner
If the bill came as GAEB, the planner gets the X84 file back: the same structure as the file that came in, filled with your prices and totals and validated against the official schema before download. Whoever has no GAEB gets the quote as a PDF in bill-of-quantities layout: a column with the position number, headings and subtotals per title, the text completions filled in, alternatives in their place, non-counting titles below the total.
What is different with a PDF
A bill of quantities as PDF is almost always a text PDF from a tendering program, with a fixed column grid. Bautimer finds that grid and reads the positions from it. Every position read carries an estimate of how certain it is; uncertain rows are flagged in the review and count as open until you have looked at them. If Bautimer finds no grid in the file, it stops instead of producing nonsense – then you paste the positions as a table.
What the import cannot do: read scanned paper bills (no OCR) and import without review. The review step is deliberate – a PDF is not a data format.
Afterwards: the quote
The imported quote is a normal Bautimer quote. You can add material positions, show overheads as a position of their own, enter surcharges and a discount, and print the PDF on your own letterhead. What the quote does today is on the feature overview.