Bill of Quantities Production

Creating a bill of quantities

Create the content of the bill. Edit and Tidy the bill up Printing it out. It's that simple!!, The following headers talk a bit more in-depth about each individual process, as well as some extra features.

Seven easy way to create the bill contents

1. Proforma copies and strips the measurement content to give you an empty shell for editing and re-measuring. Substantial time saver for repetitive work.
2. Copy and Paste between an existing project and the current project.
3. Paste special enables you to copy a group of items into two or more elements or to duplicate a group of items where the items are similar but have slightly different specification content.
4. Copy Items copied from a library.
5. Items may be manually typed in.
6. Save time with similar items .The Clone button enables an existing item to be copied and then changed. Use the the size sort feature where the only difference is the size..
7. Import existing bill from Word, Excel, ASCII, RTF and CITE.

Quick and easy editing

Click on the item and type in the changes.

The spelling checker dialog enables you to check your spellings. The spell check engine has been trained so that ordinarily it will skip over part numbers and size information. You may add to the standard dictionary.

The bookmark items that you wish to return to quickly. Most useful for marking incomplete specification items or queries for the architect.

Work together in a multi-user environment

Libraries are designed to be a shared resource and when Vector is operated over a network several users can see the same library.

On larger projects where more than one person is required, you use Vector in a very similar manner to which most practice's work manually. Each surveyor works separately on his own section(s), when completed - the sections may be combined into the final project. Vector automatically sort and consolidate items to produce the consolidated final bill.

Vector has comprehensive checking capability to resolve problems that can arrise when more than one person is working on a project.

Vector may be used on a network or on multiple separate machines. We have clients happily using both of these approaches.

Measuring quantities

A sufficiently important topic that we have treated this subject separately. See Measuring in the left hand panel.

Sorting and Consolidation made easy

Vector has four predefined sort fields which are available on standard projects. Additional sort fields can be defined when they are needed for complex projects. The four standard sort codes are:

• Entry: Take-off order of work
• Library: which is normally the same as the SMM order
• Element: this stores the elemental section (BCIS, SFBS or cook your own)
• Extra: is an additional grouping you may need (Phase Building etc)

A typical user defined sort might be Scotish Trade Order which normal consist of "Trade + Element + SMM7",

To change the order of viewing, simply click on a sort button and the order will be changed. In any order of view, the Bill can be displayed with dupicated items consolidated or un-consolidated by simply pressing on the consolidation button.

Instant Subtotals, Collections and Summaries

Vector is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program and displays subtotals, collections and summary on the screen. When pagination is turned on, Vector will automatically create the paging for your project based on the current set of rules that have been selected. The paging rules can be adjusted to suit your requirements. We call these automatically created page or section breaks soft breaks because they have been created by the program. Soft Breaks will automatically adjust as you add and amend the content of your bill. In a similar way to most word processors you may manually overwrite soft page breaks with hard page breaks.

Elemental Bill

Vector makes creating Element Bill easy, standard structures BCIS, SFBS are predefined. Equally important is the flexibility to define your own elements to meet the requirements of the job in hand.

Importing / Exporting data

The Inter-operability of programs is becoming a increasingly important feature of modern windows applications. Vector supports two separate data export routes.

Multi-target printing. Vector supports multi-target printing. Ordinarily any report output will come out of the printer in the normal way. However, we can change our target to Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel and the report will pop up as in Word as a document or in Excel as a spreadsheet
MS Excel Example MS Word Example Export C.I.T.E. File
Traditional file Import / exports. Import / Export from C.I.T.E, Excel, Word, RTF, dBase IV, CSV plus a number of more specialist formats. Snape Import / export filters use a plugin model so it is easy to add additional specialst filters to meet specifc client requirements.
	Bill on Disk and Vector Pricing Program In addition to being able to export your data to other programs via the multi-target print option or the traditional file export, Vector supports a true bill on disk with its own pricing program. When you click on the 'Create bill on disk utility' it reads your detailed bill file and creates a simplified bill. The simplified bill file has all the information the contractor needs, but not your work up detail and specification content is locked. The conversion utility then creates a Windows installable floppy disk, which contains the bill (or bills) to be priced and a royalty free Windows pricing program. The contractor uses the pricing program to price the project, and then sent back the priced bill on a floppy that Vector can import into its full detailed working document.

Flexibility of Units of measure and rounding of quantities

Snape have defined all the ordinary units of measure within Vector. However occasionally a user may wish to use some unusual unit for legitimate reasons. Units of measure are defined within a table which specifies the units name, how it is measured and what are the formatting rules to be used in printed reports. New units of measure may be adding by entering extra units to the definition table.

Similarly you may define the rules by which quantities are rounded within the current job, and if steelwork will treated as an exception to the standard rules.