Estimate a tender in a day, not a week.
Type the work in your own words. The app finds the clause in your rate book, fills the unit and the rate, works out the material, the manpower and the machinery the job will take, and hands you a BOQ with live Excel formulas. Every quantity is entered exactly once.
An estimate is not only a BOQ. It is the three M's.
Material, Manpower and Machinery. Most offices work the first one out on a side sheet, guess the second, and never write the third down at all. Here all three come out of the same measurement — because in Quantity Master a formula is one work activity split into exactly those three parts.
One formula. Three parts. No second entry.
A formula such as "M25 Concrete" or "Internal plaster 12 mm" is written in steps: what one unit of that work consumes in material, in manpower and in machinery. Pick the formula on a Measurement Book item, and the app multiplies your measured quantity through every line of all three.
Manpower and machinery are optional on a formula — a work you give out on a labour rate needs neither. Fill them in and the requirement is there; leave them out and the material list behaves exactly as it always did.
Where the norms are kept50 cum of M25, measured once.
You typed 50 cum in the Measurement Book and picked the M25 formula. Not one number below this line is typed by anybody — each is your quantity times a consumption norm you can open and check.
| M | Line | Working | Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| M-1 | Cement OPC 53 | 50 × 7.6 | 380 bags |
| M-1 | Sand (fine aggregate) | 50 × 0.45 | 22.5 cum |
| M-1 | Aggregate 20 mm | 50 × 0.51 | 25.5 cum |
| M-1 | Aggregate 10 mm | 50 × 0.34 | 17 cum |
| M-1 | Water | 50 × 0.186 | 9.3 kl |
| M-2 | Mason | 50 × 0.17 | 8.5 man-days |
| M-2 | Mazdoor | 50 × 1.60 | 80 man-days |
| M-2 | Bhisti | 50 × 0.70 | 35 man-days |
| M-3 | Concrete mixer | 50 × 0.07 | 3.5 machine-days |
| M-3 | Needle vibrator | 50 × 0.07 | 3.5 machine-days |
Open any row on screen and it shows its own working — 50.00 × 7.6000 = 380. That is the line you put in front of a client or an auditor who questions the figure. And because every one of these is a view of the same measurement, correcting the slab thickness corrects the cement, the mazdoor-days and the mixer-days in the same second.
The same norm sets the duration of the activity.
A manpower norm is man-days per unit. Turn it round and it is output per day. So when the programme asks how long an activity takes, it does not ask you to guess — it builds one gang out of the trades in the formula, works out what that gang delivers in a day, and you type only how many gangs you are putting on.
Duration = Quantity ÷ (Output × Crew size). It works both ways: type the days instead and it tells you the crew you need to hit them.
- The estimate and the programme cannot disagree, because there is only one norm and both read it. Change the norm and the man-days and the duration move together.
- The same man-days become a week-by-week labour histogram by trade on the Resources screen — so you know how many masons to have on site in week six, not just how many the job needs in total.
- Machinery is shown as a requirement, in machine-days at the planned rate of work. It does not shorten the activity on its own — that is your call, not the software's.
From a norm to ten working days.
The formula's manpower norm is 0.21 man-days per sqm — 0.09 mason, 0.10 mazdoor, 0.02 bhisti. The app builds that into whole people and reads the output off the trade that runs out first.
Output is what the gang's tightest trade can actually deliver, so after rounding to whole people it can read a little under gang ÷ norm. You can override it on any activity, and one click puts the formula's value back.
Ten screens that build one estimate.
They are not ten separate tools. The rate book feeds the Measurement Book, the Measurement Book feeds everything else, and the estimate you finish here is the same estimate the site works to and the bill is raised from.
Where the days actually go in a tender
Hunting the clause
Scrolling a 240-page SOR PDF for the right sub-clause, and a wrong one coming back as a rejected bill.
Typing one quantity three times
Estimate sheet, abstract, material sheet — the same figure, and only one of them gets corrected.
Rebuilding after a drawing revision
A footing depth changes and half a day goes into finding every cell that depended on it.
The rate book lives in the app. CPWD 2023 is already inside.
4,060 CPWD items ship with the software, including the letter-suffixed clauses that most conversions swallow — 5.22A, 5.22B, 5.22C are all there as separate rates. You are not typing a rate book before you can start work.
Beside it you can keep as many books as you need: your state PWD book, a department's tender schedule, and your own company price list. Every project on the computer reads the same library.
- Import a PDF. The app reads the columns on its own. When a book prints a completed rate and a labour rate side by side, you pick which column is the rate and every row re-fills.
- Import an Excel or CSV. It finds the header row and matches Sr / Code, Description, Unit and Rate. Total rows are dropped. There is a ready template to type your own rates into.
- Nothing is saved until you say so. The import opens as a preview — correct a cell, delete a junk row like CHAPTER 4, then confirm.
- Read it the way it is printed. Tree view builds the clause tree from the SR numbers, so 4.1.1 to 4.1.9 sit folded under 4.1.
What a loaded book looks like
Three rows out of four thousand. The unit and the rate on these lines are what your Measurement Book will pick up.
| SR No | Work description | Unit | Rate (₹) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.8.1 | Earthwork in excavation, ordinary soil, up to 1.5 m depth | CUM | 213.85 |
| 4.1.6 | Providing and laying PCC 1:3:6 (nominal mix) | CUM | 7,178.75 |
| 13.1.2 | 12 mm cement plaster 1:6, internal walls | SQM | 212.75 |
Teach it your site words once
Your team does not say "clause 4.1.6". They say "footing PCC". Map the words they use to the clause once, and the Measurement Book fills everything after that.
| What is typed | What the app fills |
|---|---|
| Footing PCC | 4.1.6 · cum · ₹7,178.75 · Concrete Work |
| Internal plaster 12mm | 13.1.2 · sqm · ₹212.75 · Plaster Work |
| Anti-termite treatment to plinth | 1.24 — found by AI Match, marked as an AI pick |
District-wise rates
Several state books price the same item differently in every district — one row can carry fifteen rates. The app keeps them all against that item. Choose the district on the project and every rate in the estimate follows it. A book with one rate behaves exactly as it always did.
Download a book from our server
Import → Import from Server lists the books we have published, grouped by country and state. One click downloads and imports it. When we publish a corrected version later, the same row reads Sync and updates the rates in place — the items already used in your estimates keep their link.
Compare before you quote
Set one book as the base and see every other book against it. Items are matched by SR number first, then by description overlap. Cheaper shows green, costlier shows red — so you know where your own rate sits before the bid goes in.
Type the heading. Six more boxes fill themselves.
This is the one screen where a quantity is typed in the whole app. Everything after it — the abstract, the cement, the steel, the programme, the client bill — is a view of what you enter here. It is worth knowing well, so here is exactly how it behaves.
One heading, and the item is set up
Type Internal plaster 12mm in the Item Heading and press Keywords. The app searches your saved site words and the whole rate book, and when you pick the clause it fills:
When your words match nothing — a long, unusual description — AI Match reads the heading and recommends one clause with its reason. If AI is not connected it falls back to offline matching, so the screen never stops working.
Then the measurements: Nos × L × W × H
One row for each shape you measured, with a name so the printed bill reads properly. Sub-headings separate blocks — Ground floor, First floor, Deductions.
| Sub-item | Nos | Length | Breadth | H / Depth | Qty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 footing bed | 6 | 1.500 | 1.500 | 0.300 | 4.050 |
| F2 footing bed | 2 | 1.800 | 1.800 | 0.300 | 1.944 |
| Group total | 5.994 | ||||
- Set the Active Unit first. With mm selected, typing 1500 is stored as 1.5 m — no dividing by a thousand in your head.
- A blank dimension counts as 1, not 0. A running metre item is Nos and Length only, and the quantity still comes out right.
- Click a column header to change every value in it at once — H / Depth × 2 turns every 0.30 into 0.60 in one click when the drawing changes.
Four things estimators do all day, made quick
Maths inside the cell
A dimension box takes arithmetic, not just a number. Type 1.8*1.8 in a length and the grid shows 3.24 — click back into the cell and your original 1.8*1.8 is still there to correct. Cells can point at each other too: =L1*B1 in a height box takes row 1's length times row 1's breadth, so a change upstream carries down.
Press / for a formula
Typing / in a cell opens the formula list. Save the shapes you keep redoing — (L + B) / 2 * H as "Trapezoid area" — and pick them by name forever after. Pasted Excel formulas work as well, with ROUND, PI(), POWER, SQRT and the rest. Your formulas are saved on the server, so they are waiting for you on the next computer too.
Deductions that read like a measurement sheet
Add a sub-heading called "Deductions" and enter the openings with negative Nos. The sub-heading row carries text only, adds nothing to the quantity, and prints as a heading in both the Excel and the PDF — so the sheet you hand over looks like a measurement sheet, not a spreadsheet dump.
Repeat work without retyping it
Copy an item into a new one and the heading and all the measurement rows come across, with the clause cleared so you re-pick it deliberately. Tick a whole block of items and copy them into another sub-project when Tower B repeats Tower A. A missed item can be inserted above a row instead of landing at the bottom of the book.
Smart Import reads the estimate you already made in Excel.
Your last twenty tenders are sitting in spreadsheets. Smart Import opens one, works out which column is which even when the headings are typed as "Particulers", "Lengh" and "Quntity", groups the rows under their S.No headings, keeps the sub-rows, and reads a deduction block as negative.
Then it does the part that actually takes you days: it matches each item to a clause in the rate book you selected, and fills the unit, the rate, the work category, the stage and the material formula on every row it matched.
- Everything lands in a preview first. Nothing is written to the project until you press Import, and you can untick any row you are not happy with.
- Where your typed total does not agree with the dimensions — a trapezoidal footing, say — the app keeps your total and says so, instead of quietly changing your figure.
- Quantity comes from your sheet; the clause and the rate come from the rate book you picked. Pick the right book first and the whole file is priced correctly in one go.
145 items in. 124 clauses matched on their own.
The rest are shown unmatched rather than guessed at, so you can point them at the right clause yourself. The preview shows heading, quantity, unit, SOR number, category, stage and formula for every row before a single item is created.
One item, from four footings to a priced line.
PCC 1:3:6 bed below the footings. You type the heading, pick the clause, and enter one measurement row. Nothing else on this page is typed by you.
| Sub-item | Nos | Length | Breadth | H / Depth | Qty (cum) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 footing bedClause 4.1.6 · PCC 1:3:6 (nominal mix) · cum | 4 | 1.500 | 1.500 | 0.300 | 2.700 |
| Group total | 2.700 | ||||
That single line is now doing five jobs. It is a row in the BOQ under Concrete Work. It is 11.99 bags of cement in the Bill of Materials. It is an activity in the programme with a duration worked out from the labour norm. It is the quantity the site reports progress against. And when the client bill is raised, the billed quantity is checked against this same 2.700 — not against a figure somebody retyped.
The BOQ is a view of the measurements, not a second file.
Nothing is typed on this screen. It reads the Measurement Book, groups the items by work category or by stage, puts a subtotal under each group, and merges lines that share the same clause, grade, rate and unit into one priced row — while the detail behind them stays in the measurement sheet where it belongs.
- Group by work category or by stage, sort it, choose which columns print, and set your own heading, footer and signature blocks. The settings are remembered for next time.
- The description printed on each line is built from the clause and sub-clause text, so the abstract reads like a real bill of quantities and not like a list of codes.
- Add-on charges are stacked in sequence, the way a department works them — not all calculated on the base and added together.
How the add-ons stack
A ₹12,00,000 estimate, with electrification at 5% and contingency at 3%. Contingency is worked on the running total, not on the base — worth ₹1,800 on this small job, and lakhs on a real tender.
With 18% GST on top, the same estimate reads ₹15,31,404. GST is a tick-box — leave it off for a departmental estimate, turn it on for a quotation.
Excel that still works after you send it
The export is not a picture of your numbers. Quantity cells in the BOQ sheet are linked back to the estimation sheet in the same workbook. Amount is a real = Qty × Rate formula. Subtotals are real SUMs. Change 6 footings to 8 in the estimation sheet and the BOQ, the subtotal and the grand total all move — in front of the client, on their own computer.
How much cement does one cum need? Answer it once, for the whole company.
This is the engine under the Bill of Materials. You tell the app what one unit of a work consumes — material, labour and machinery — and every quantity in every project turns into bags, cum, man-days and machine-days without anyone calculating.
A consumption formula, written the way it is derived
Concrete 1:1.5:3, per cum, with a dry factor of 1.54, a cement bag of 0.0347 cum and a water–cement ratio of 0.5. The formula is not a hard-coded number — it is the working, so anyone can check it and change one factor.
| Material | Per 1 cum | How it is worked out |
|---|---|---|
| Cement | 8.07 bag | (1 / 5.5) × 1.54 ÷ 0.0347 |
| Sand | 0.42 cum | (1.5 / 5.5) × 1.54 |
| Aggregate 20 mm | 0.504 cum | (3 / 5.5) × 1.54 × 0.6 |
| Aggregate 10 mm | 0.336 cum | (3 / 5.5) × 1.54 × 0.4 |
| Water | 0.202 kl | 8.07 × 50 × 0.5 ÷ 1000 |
A Measurement Book item of 100 cum then shows 807 bags of cement, and at ₹400 a bag that one line of the material list is ₹3,22,800. Wastage is folded into the saved expression, so 2% on 2.78 is stored and shown as 2.78 × 1.02.
M25 is a design mix here, not a volumetric shortcut
Most estimating sheets apply the nominal 1:1:2 ratio to M25. Work it through and you get about 11 bags — roughly 555 kg of cement in a cubic metre, which is past the 450 kg ceiling IS 456 allows, with around 250 litres of water.
Civil Limitless uses IS 10262 design-mix figures for M25 and above: 7.6 bags — 380 kg — with 186 litres of water per cum, and 8.3 bags for M30. M5 to M20 stay on their nominal mixes, which are perfectly valid under IS 456.
It is a quiet difference that shows up as several lakh rupees of cement on a large concrete job, and as an estimate that survives scrutiny.
Labour and machinery norms, not just material
The same formula carries the trades and the machines. Concrete work, per cum: 0.17 day of a mason, 1.60 of a mazdoor, 0.70 of a bhisti, and 0.07 day each of the mixer and the vibrator.
That gives you a Bill of Manpower and a Bill of Machinery beside the Bill of Materials — and later, in planning, it is what turns a quantity into a duration for a given gang size.
How the norms drive the programmeAuto Generate
Seven standard work types — concrete, plaster, masonry, flooring, painting, waterproofing and steel — with the usual values already in the boxes. Give plastering a thickness of 12 mm, a 1:6 sand ratio and a dry factor of 1.33, and the formula is built for you to review before saving.
Rate Lists per city and per year
Keep "Raipur Q1 2026" with cement at ₹400 and a mason at ₹800, and another set for the next district or the next financial year. Pick one on the project and every material line re-prices. A rate you leave blank quietly falls back to the master rate rather than becoming zero.
Change a formula, recompute the project
Edit a mix and the app recalculates every Measurement Book item that uses it — "Formula saved — 22 material items updated". Editing one of the built-in formulas saves a copy for that project only, so your change never leaks into another job.
When the book has no rate for it, build one from first principles.
New item of work, a non-schedule item, or a departmental rate you think is out of date — open a rate analysis, pick the work type and the recipe, and press Auto-fill all. Material, manpower and machinery drop in with the quantities from your consumption formula and the prices from the rate list you chose. For M25 that is six material rows, three labour rows and two machinery rows in one click.
Then you correct it like an estimator does: today's cement rate, 2% wastage on a line, a carriage row for the sand, an extra mazdoor for the night pour.
- Push to SOR turns the finished rate into a rate item in your book, so the Measurement Book can pick it like any other clause.
- Save into project makes a copy priced at that site's own rates — the same analysis costs more where cement is ₹420.
M25 concrete, 1 cum
The four percentages stack, one on top of the other, the way a rate analysis is actually built up.
Build mortar once. Use it inside everything.
A rate analysis can contain another rate analysis. Work out 1:4 mortar properly one time, then pull it into plaster, into brickwork, into pointing — 0.30 cum of mortar at a base rate of ₹4,400 comes in as ₹1,320.
You choose the basis. Base takes the child's raw cost so profit and GST are charged once, at the end, on the parent — the right answer for your own intermediate item. Full takes the child's finished rate, which is what you want when a sub-contractor supplies that item complete. The same line is ₹1,320 one way and ₹1,770 the other, and the app shows you which you picked.
A rate cannot end up inside itself — the app refuses a circular reference instead of silently looping.
Change the cement rate in one analysis and every rate built on top of it moves. That is the whole point of building rates in the app instead of in twelve separate spreadsheets.
Steel is estimated bar by bar. It has a page of its own.
A bar bending schedule is not a table you type — it is a set of rules from the drawing. Write each bar as a formula once, in the member's own variables, and every cutting length follows the drawing through every revision. Then the cutting plan works stage by stage, the way a yard actually cuts: footing off-cuts are tagged, carried forward and cut into column bars instead of going to scrap.
On a real project in the app that took steel waste from 13.93% down to 1.23% — 469 stock rods down to 410. Zero is the target, and this is how close the plan gets you to it.
Measured on a live project in the app, not a target. The steel page has the 69 IS 2502 and BS 8666 bar shapes, the auto-calculators for footings, columns, beams and slabs, the bar drawn to scale from your own formula, and the cutting cards printed for the yard.
Measure off the drawing, straight into the measurement sheet.
Load a vector PDF plotted from CAD, click the two ends of a line you know and type its real length. From that moment the sheet is scaled, and every wall, slab and footing you click is a measurement — going directly into the Nos, L, B or D cell you highlighted, not onto a scrap of paper.
- Object snap pulls your click onto the real line end, corner or crossing read out of the PDF. That is what makes 4.500 come out as 4.500 and not 4.487. Ortho locks a line to horizontal or vertical, exactly like AutoCAD.
- Count what repeats. Click each footing, or switch the count tool to automatic, type the tag "F1", and it finds and places all twelve.
- Deduct mode turns the next take-offs negative — a 1.2 × 2.1 door in a wall area enters as −2.52, under a Deductions sub-heading.
- A formula per row when the shape is not a box. PI/4*L*L*D on a 0.45 m circular column, 3.0 m high, gives 0.477.
- Layers per trade, each with its own colour, its own eye and its own lock, so the plan does not turn into a scribble by the third item.
DWG and DXF are accepted too — a DWG is converted to PDF first. The import panel reports the real stages as it goes: bytes uploaded, sheets found, lines extracted. Nothing pretends to be finished before it is.
A footing layout at 1:100
Calibrated on a grid line typed as 4500 mm, then the PCC below twelve identical F1 footings taken off in four clicks.
| Cell | Where the number came from | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Nos | Count tool, automatic, tag "F1" | 12 |
| L | Length take-off across one footing | 1.500 m |
| B | Length take-off down one footing | 1.200 m |
| D | Typed by hand — thickness is not on the plan | 0.100 m |
| Quantity sent to the Measurement Book | 2.160 | |
The scale belongs to one sheet, not the whole file — each page of a multi-sheet set asks for its own calibration, because that is the only honest way to do it. Auto-round nudges a length within 0.5% of a round figure onto it, so 1799.5 mm reads 1800 mm; areas, counts and DXF sheets are left exact.
Quantity Survey beside it
Trade-wise surveys — concrete, plaster, brick, formwork, finishing, earthwork, waterproofing — that stay in step with the Measurement Book instead of drifting away from it.
Bill of Materials
Every material the project needs, consolidated at a weighted-average rate, with a calculation report that shows measured quantity × consumption per unit for each item, so the number can be defended.
The paperwork, ready to sign
Measurement book, BOQ, material schedule, steel schedule and cutting cards — all with your company heading, print setup and signature blocks already in place.
Bring one of your tenders.
Thirty minutes on a call. Send us the estimate you are working on right now and we will import it, match the clauses and price it while you watch.