The tender's own bill, priced in its own cells
When the tender pack includes its bill of quantities as a spreadsheet, Bidligence reads every sheet that carries a bill and records where each line sits, by sheet and row. The items, units, quantities and numbering stay the employer's; only the rates are yours.
The priced copy is the employer's own workbook with your rates written into its Rate and Amount cells; its styles, headings, numbering and the employer's own figures are left untouched. Amounts go in as formulas (quantity × rate), each subtotal sums its own section, and the employer's contingency and total formulas stand. A bill issued as .xls or CSV has to be saved as .xlsx and uploaded again before it can be filled in place.
If the tender issued no BOQ workbook, Bidligence drafts a bill from the scope of works for you to check, then prices it.
Why the formulas matter: under the World Bank's Request for Bids for small works (two-envelope, September 2025 edition), when a unit price and its line total disagree in an admeasurement contract, the unit price generally prevails and the total is corrected, and a bid whose bidder refuses the correction is rejected. Your own tender's instructions to bidders govern.
The order in which a rate is chosen
Every line you price is first built up from first principles. Stronger evidence then replaces that rate wherever it covers the line:
A won-contract or library rate must also pass a sanity check: one far out of line with the built-up rate, or resting on evidence spread over an order of magnitude, is set aside and the reason recorded for your team. Each line is labelled with its source. On a bill Bidligence drafted itself, a line the build-up misses keeps its drafted rate and shows no build-up.
The bid's procurement profile names local price sources for the search; for Papua New Guinea, for example, the Department of Works and Highways schedule of rates. Bidligence has 21 regional profiles plus a global one.
- 1Your won-contract rate, where a contract you won covers the same scope. An installation-only rate, where the client supplied the material, prices a full-scope line only when combined with a sourced material cost.
- 2Your rate library estimate, when it clears the library's confidence gate.
- 3The built-up rate: labour, plant, material, transport and subcontract costs priced with web searches for the bid's region, citing the pages used.
A build-up and cited sources behind every rate
A built-up rate is the sum of its components for one unit of the line, each a quantity per unit times a unit cost. Bidligence recomputes that arithmetic itself, so a build-up that does not add up never reaches the bill.
Below the BOQ table, each line shows its build-up, assumed productivity, justification, price sources, library notes and a high, medium or low confidence rating. Build-ups are for your team only: they never go into the employer's workbook, and they export in a separate Rate Review (Basis of Rates) workbook marked as an internal working paper.
Your won-contract rates come first and stay private
Upload the priced bill of a contract you won on the Rate Library page. Bidligence reads the original contract columns, refuses any rate or quantity not printed in the document, and drops lines whose quantity × rate does not match the printed amount; you review what it would keep and what it refused, with reasons, before importing. Bids you record as won add their priced lines too.
Installation-only rates and lump sums priced for a whole contract are labelled as such. Won-contract rates are never shared with other workspaces or blended into the shared rate index, whatever your sharing setting, and you can remove an imported contract at any time.
A rate library with provenance and confidence
Bidligence also keeps a library of construction unit rates by country. Each observation records where it came from, such as a published schedule, a supplier quotation or price list you uploaded, an RFQ quote, cited web research, a won contract or your own entry. An item's estimate is a weighted median of its observations, adjusted for price movements since each was observed, with a range and a confidence score.
The model's own estimates do not count towards confidence, and an estimate with no published schedule, supplier quote, RFQ quote or won contract behind it has its confidence capped. The Market rates button checks a batch of lines against your library, then the web, and shows each market rate beside your base rate with its source; one click adopts it.
Supplier and subcontractor quotes, compared line by line
On the Pro plan, you can send any part of the BOQ to suppliers and subcontractors as a request for quotation. They price it through a link, with no account and in their own currency, and never see your rates. Quotes received by e-mail or PDF can be entered by hand.
A levelling matrix compares the quotes line by line and highlights the lowest. A quote Bidligence cannot convert is held back rather than read one-for-one, a zero rate means "included elsewhere" and never counts as lowest, and a supplier who declined drops out. Apply the lowest per item, or award the package to one supplier, and the rates go into the BOQ with your margin added.
Margin, provisional sums, contingency and currency
The totals follow the rules of the employer's bill:
- Your margin is set with a slider and added to every rate you price.
- Provisional and prime-cost sums stay at the employer's figure and are never marked up.
- A percentage contingency the tender's own bill adds below its subtotal appears as its own line, and the generated documents and completed forms quote the total the tender's workbook adds up to.
- Price in any of 100 currencies with the home-currency equivalent beside the bid price. When you change the bid currency on a priced BOQ, you choose whether its rates convert at the exchange rate or keep their figures; with no exchange rate available, the conversion is refused.
- A generated bill with a line left unpriced is not saved, and the tender's workbook is not exported while any of its lines lacks a rate.
- Where the tender or the bid records an estimate, a bill well above it, or far enough below it to look abnormally low, gets a warning in the bid's activity naming the largest lines to check.
In the World Bank's small works bidding document (two-envelope, September 2025 edition), for admeasurement contracts, items left without a rate are not paid for when executed and are deemed covered by the other rates, and bids are evaluated on price excluding provisional sums and any contingency provision in the summary bill.
What you export
The workbooks and forms the employer receives are built from your client-facing rates, with pricing provenance (which contract, which supplier, what confidence) stripped from the notes.
- the priced BOQ in the tender's own workbook, when it was issued as .xlsx or .xlsm;
- a Bill of Quantities workbook in your company's colours, with a cover sheet;
- the Rate Review, which stays out of the submission ZIP;
- the complete bid package as one ZIP.
What it does not do
Bidligence does not measure quantities from drawings, and its rates are market-calibrated estimates with their sources shown, not guaranteed prices. Your estimator checks them against site conditions, haul distances and your own costs. For the method behind a priced bill, read how to price a BOQ; for the checks that come after it, see the tender compliance check.
Questions
- Can Bidligence fill in the BOQ spreadsheet the tender issued?
- Yes, when it is an .xlsx or .xlsm workbook. Bidligence writes your rates and amount formulas into the employer's own cells and leaves the items, quantities, provisional sums and total formulas as issued.
- Where do Bidligence's BOQ rates come from?
- Your won-contract rates first where the scope matches, then your rate library where an estimate clears its confidence checks, then a rate built up from prices found on the web, with the pages cited.
- Are my contract rates shared with other Bidligence customers?
- No. Rates from contracts you have won are never shared with other workspaces or added to the shared rate index, whatever your sharing setting.
- Does Bidligence do quantity take-off from drawings?
- No. Quantities come from the tender's own bill of quantities when it is issued as a spreadsheet. Otherwise Bidligence drafts a bill from the scope of works for your estimator to check.
- Can I see a priced BOQ before choosing a plan?
- Yes. A new account receives 500 welcome credits once its e-mail address is confirmed, for analysing a tender, getting its Bid Score and seeing its BOQ priced. Generating the bid documents needs Starter or Pro, both of which start with a 3-day free trial.
Sources
Rules and portals change. Check the tender’s own documents and the official source before you rely on any of this.