Every quote for a job, in one sheet, with the gaps showing.

You send the same questions to three piling contractors. All three price it. What comes back is three quotations, in three different orders, in three firms’ own wording, with three different things left out. One is a PDF, one is a spreadsheet, one is a photograph of a sheet somebody filled in by hand. You drop them in as they arrived. Every priced line is read out of them and put against the item you asked about, and you do not type any of it.

The quote levelling sheet on a real build: the reader's items down the left, three piling contractors across the top, and each firm's own figure in the cell.

A real sheet from the build you can look round: 35 items, three firms. The section below is how the figures in it got there.

How it gets there

The quotes you were sent
A PDF, a spreadsheet, a Word document, or a photograph of one somebody wrote out by hand. As they arrived. You drop them in; you do not retype them.
The enquiry you issued
The list of what you asked to be priced, which is what the rows are.

The Piling comparison on a real build: three firms, their printed totals, the date each came back, and the document each one arrived as — a Word file, a PDF and a spreadsheet. Below them, the box the quotes are dropped into.

Three firms, three different kinds of file, dropped in as they arrived.

Nothing about the three of them lines up. One prices by the metre, one by the pile, one buries the standing time in a note at the back, and they do not even arrive in the same kind of file. Each is read line by line, and each priced line is lifted in the words the firm used for it, with its unit, its quantity and its rate kept beside it.

One firm's return: the total printed on their quotation, £192,962.08, against £192,875.50 read off their own priced lines, and a note that the £86.58 difference is worth looking at because a line may have been missed.

What their paper says it comes to, against what their own priced lines add up to.

The same firm's lines, each in the wording they used, placed against the reader's numbered item, with one row reading Not one of your items and its picker still open to be answered.

Their wording on the left, your item beside it. The one it could not place is still asking.

Then each of those lines is put against the item you asked about. Where it is not certain which of your items a line answers, it does not decide for you: it shows you the firm’s own wording beside your item and asks. You confirm it or you move it, and the sheet is built from what you confirmed.

And it says how sure it is of every line it read, beside that line. A figure in a ruled column on a spreadsheet is not read with the same certainty as one in biro on a photographed page, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The lines read off one quotation, each with a row of small marks beside it showing how confidently it was read, alongside what the firm wrote, the amount, and what kind of line it is.

Thirty-nine lines read off one quotation, each marked with how well it was read.

It does not read everything equally well, and it says so rather than averaging it away. On this quotation the priced lines came back full marks and the two the firm had excluded came back lower, because a sentence explaining why something is not in the price is harder to read than a number in a column.

One question it will not let you skip past, and it is the one that decides which quote is cheapest: whether their total includes VAT. Read a gross total as a net one and the dearest firm looks like the best price.

The header fields read off a quotation — who sent it, their reference, the total they printed and the date — each with a confidence mark, and the VAT question set apart with a note asking the reader to confirm that one themselves.

Every field marked with how sure it is, and one of them handed back to you to answer.

Nothing is taken from a document until you have been through it. And all of that is a statement about how well it read the paper, never about how good the quote is: nobody here is scoring your contractors.

Where a firm never priced one of your items at all, the cell stays empty rather than being guessed at. An empty cell is the whole point of the sheet.

▶video slot: three PDFs going in, one sheet coming outfilmed once the build stops moving

What it saves you

The cheapest price is not the cheapest job until you know what is not in it.

On this build the three quotes came in at £192,962, £194,777 and £219,384. The obvious reading is that one firm is £26,000 dearer than another. The sheet says something else: the cheapest quote had priced 34 of the 35 items, and the dearest had left seven of them blank.

The lower half of the same sheet: several cells read Not mentioned or Excluded, and the last two rows show each firm's printed total against the sum of the lines they actually priced.

The empty cells are the point. So are the last two rows: what each firm printed as their total, and what their own priced lines add up to.

Two of the seven the dearest firm left blank were the extra depth if a pile has to go deeper than the drawing says, and the temporary casing if the bore will not stand up on its own. Those are the two that arrive in the same week, on the week the ground is not what the survey said.

The three totals are not answers to the same list, so we do not tell you how far apart they really are. Nobody honestly can until the blanks are filled. What the sheet does is show you exactly which questions to go back and ask, and of whom.

And it does not go anywhere. Nine months on, when somebody says the casing was never in his price, the list you sent him and the quote he sent back are both still filed against that package.

The same question

All three were sent the same 35 lines, written out, so nobody was pricing their own idea of the job.

What each left out

One priced all but one line. The other two left six and seven of them blank.

Why the totals lie

Three numbers that look comparable are not, because they are not answers to the same list.

And it stays

Filed against the package, with the date it came in and the document it came from.

What you get out

The sheet

Your lines down the side, one column per firm.

A summary

One page: the totals, and what each firm left out.

A spreadsheet

If you would rather work on the numbers yourself.

Start seven days See this one on a real build