Estimating

Estimating is where a job gets priced before it is a job. An estimate lives at organisation level, not on a project, because at the point you are pricing it there is no project: there is a set of drawings, a closing date and a decision about whether to bid at all. Everything you build here, the take-off, the rates, the workings, stays with the estimate afterwards, so a price you have to defend eighteen months later is still explainable.

It helps to know where Estimating stops. Estimating is pre-award: your own price, your own workings, seen by nobody outside your organisation. Tenders is the inbound side, where somebody else has invited you to price their package. Procurement is post-award and lives on a project, where you are the one sending packages out. The three do not overlap.

The pipeline: list and Kanban

Estimating opens on a register of every estimate your organisation holds, and it has two views of the same rows. List is the ordinary register screen, filterable and groupable like every other register in Teralo. Kanban lays the same estimates out as a board, one column per pipeline stage, and you move an estimate by dragging its card.

Each estimate carries a reference of the form EST-0001, numbered per organisation, plus a name, the client, a value, a due date and an owner. The board also shows how long a card has been sitting in its current stage, which is the number that tells you an enquiry has gone quiet.

The stages are your organisation's, not ours. Teralo starts you with Enquiry, Pricing, Review and Submitted as the open stages, then Won, Lost and Archived. Archived is how an estimate leaves the board without being deleted.

Inside an estimate

An estimate is a workbook of tabs, and a tab is one of two things.

A drawing tab holds a drawing you measure on: PDF, DWG or IFC. A table tab holds a pricing grid that behaves like a spreadsheet. The two are joined by naming: quantities measured on a drawing roll up into a named group, and a cell in a table asks that group for its quantity by name. Nothing is copied across, so a measurement corrected on Tuesday is a corrected price on Tuesday.

Closing a tab does not delete anything. The drawing or the table survives and can be reopened.

Drawings, sheets and scale

A drawing is uploaded with the register detail you already keep for it: a drawing number, a revision and the date it was received. Scale is per sheet rather than per file, because a set rarely runs at one scale throughout, and a drawing-wide multiplier sits over the top for the cases where a whole file needs correcting.

When a new set arrives mid-tender

This is the moment most take-offs go wrong, so it is worth reading before it happens. Upload the new drawing as a replacement and Teralo marks the old one superseded. The superseded drawing becomes read only, and its measurements stop counting towards any group or formula. The copies carried forward onto the replacement count instead, so nothing is double counted and nothing silently disappears.

Delete the replacement and the original un-supersedes itself: its measurements start counting again. That is deliberate, so a mistaken upload is recoverable.

Dimension groups

Measurements are drawn on a sheet as a line, an area or a count, and every measurement belongs to a dimension group. Groups sit in folders, so a real take-off structure is a tree rather than a list.

A group does not have one quantity, it has several at once. From the same measurements it will give you a count, a length, an area, a wall area and a volume. Wall area is the perimeter times the group's default height; volume is the area times its default thickness. Set those two properties on the group and the quantities follow, which is why setting a height on a wall group is worth doing before you start drawing rather than after.

Deductions and openings

Openings and voids are measured normally and marked as a deduction, so they subtract from the group's roll-up instead of adding to it. A deduction is a measurement like any other, so it is drawn where it is rather than estimated as a percentage off the top.

An IFC drawing is different in one respect: rather than drawing on it, you filter the model by category, level or material, and the quantity comes from the model itself. The model is read in your browser, which is why an IFC take-off wants a real machine rather than a phone.

Pricing tables

A table tab is a grid with columns, formulas and the arithmetic you would expect. What makes it an estimating tool rather than a spreadsheet is that a formula can ask a dimension group for a quantity by name, so the take-off is the source and the price is derived from it.

A cell can also open into a sub-table, which is how a single line like "Structural steel" is built up out of twenty of its own lines without cluttering the sheet above it. The sub-table's result is brought forward into the parent cell.

The library

The library is your organisation's premade content, available in every estimate, and it comes in three kinds.

Rates are code, description, rate and unit, dropped into a grid through a part picker. Descriptions are text you keep having to write. Assemblies are a whole build-up, description, quantity, unit and rate together, that populates a target row along with its subtotal and total formulas.

Library groups nest, so "Main assemblies" can hold "Concrete" and "Framing" underneath it. The library is org-wide by design: an estimate that prices off a rate nobody else in the business can see is an estimate nobody else can check.

Won, lost, and what happens next

The handover bundle

Move an estimate to Won and Teralo offers you the handover bundle straight from the confirmation. That is one ZIP holding a summary PDF, a CSV of every sheet in the workbook including the drill-down sub-tables, the drawings, and the quote documents attached to your comparisons. It is the thing you hand the delivery team so they inherit the workings rather than just the number.

Move it to Lost and Teralo asks why, from a picklist your organisation controls. The defaults cover price, programme, going with another contractor, the client relationship, the project being cancelled or deferred, and not bidding at all, plus free text for anything else. It takes four seconds and it is the only way the pipeline ever tells you anything about why you lose.

Winning an estimate does not create a project or a contract. That is on purpose: the estimate is your organisation's private pricing record, and a project is a shared workspace with other companies in it.

Where all this lives

Estimating settings sit at Organisation, then Tools, then Estimating, and there are only two of them: the pipeline stages that become your Kanban columns, and the lost reasons picklist. Both start from Teralo's defaults and both are yours to change.

Estimating deliberately has no approval workflow. A stage is a status you move by hand, not an approval somebody has to grant, because an internal review before a bid goes out is a conversation rather than a sign-off. Where you do want a recorded approval on a bid, it belongs on the receiving side of the job in Procurement.

Who can do what

Estimating carries four permissions at organisation level, and they are set inside your own organisation rather than granted by a project host: viewing estimates, creating and editing them, managing the settings above, and deleting an estimate permanently.

The one worth thinking about is deletion. An estimate is the record of a price, and a lost bid is often the most useful thing in the pipeline a year later, so archive rather than delete unless there is a reason. See How permissions work.