Every quote for a job, in one sheet, with the gaps showing.
You send the same questions to three piling contractors. What comes back is three quotations, in three different orders, in three firms’ own wording, with three different things left out. 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.
How it gets there
A real run from the build you can look round: one piling package, three firms, 35 items.
Step 1 of 6
Drop the quotes in
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.
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.
Step 2 of 6
It reads every line
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.
And it says how sure it is of every line it read. A figure in a ruled column is not read with the same certainty as one in biro on a photographed page, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Step 3 of 6
It asks you the one that matters
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.
Step 4 of 6
You check where each line landed
Each line 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.
Step 5 of 6
It checks their arithmetic
What their paper says it comes to, against what their own priced lines add up to. On this one, £86.58 apart, and it says so rather than hiding it: a spreadsheet does not tell you it might have missed a line.
Step 6 of 6
The sheet, with the gaps showing
Your items down the side, one column per firm. 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.
Nobody here is scoring your contractors. It tells you how well it read the paper, never how good the quote is.
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.
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.
And it does not go anywhere. Nine months on, when somebody says the casing was never in their price, the list you sent them and the quote they 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.