Every number lived in three places. Now it lives in one.

CompanyJB Building London Ltd Based inSouth west London The workLoft conversions, extensions, refurbishments Job sizeUp to around £300,000 BeforeExcel, a few hours a valuation NowAbout twenty minutes

The old way

Every valuation started with a gathering exercise: the scope of works, the drawings, the previous valuation, the Excel with the quantities, and whatever had come back from site. Then the checking: what had actually been done, compared against the last period. Then the updating: quantities and values in the spreadsheet, variations added, retention and any advances worked through. Only then the valuation itself, and the payment application for the client. On bigger projects the information lived scattered across several Excels, drawings, emails and documents, so just collecting it and making it agree ate a serious share of the time.

“The worst part was constantly checking that all the information agreed with itself. One change on site would arrive in an email, my Excel had a different quantity, and the previous valuation had another one again. You had to work through everything by hand to be sure nothing had been missed.”

JB Building London

The moment it clicked

Like the other firms on these pages, it was the import.

“Every contractor and every project keeps the schedule a little differently, and I did not want to rebuild my spreadsheet to suit a program every time. QScope read my existing Excel and showed me how it had interpreted what was in it. That was when I saw I did not have to change my whole way of working to use it.”

JB Building London

The showing matters as much as the reading: what the import found is laid out for checking before anything is saved, and whatever it set aside is listed with a reason instead of disappearing.

Illustration of the screen, not his project data.

What changed

A typical valuation now takes him about twenty minutes, depending on the number of items; on the bigger projects, up to around £300,000, it is still far quicker than before. The saving is largest exactly where the old way hurt most: many items, many changes.

“The most useful thing for me is catching changes between valuations quickly. When quantities or values move between periods, I used to compare that myself in Excel. On groundworks there can be plenty of quantity changes, extra work and variations, so that comparison has real value. It cuts the risk of a change slipping past.”

JB Building London Illustration of the screen, not his project data. The workLofts, extensions, refurbs BeforeA few hours in Excel, every valuation NowAbout twenty minutes Trial30 days, no card

One set of figures instead of several Excels

Several projects usually run at once, and depending on the job the people involved are the QS or whoever holds the commercial side, the project manager, and the person preparing the valuations. His own summary of why one system beats the pile: “the biggest value is when everyone works on the same data, instead of having several different versions of an Excel.”

Illustration of the screen, not his project data.

What was hard

We asked, because a switch that sounds free is a switch nobody believes.

“At the start you have to get used to not working across several separate Excels any more. I had my own way of running valuations and naturally wanted to keep doing everything the way I always had. After a few projects it got easier. The main thing was understanding where each piece of information lives, and how QScope uses the data from the previous valuations.”

JB Building London

Run your next valuation the same way

“It is a tool that lets me prepare a valuation faster and keep control of the changes on a project, without digging through several Excels and documents by hand.”

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