Ofivio Planning & QS, explained: the bill as a live object

Ofivio Planning & QS exists because of one observation: on most projects the bill is authored once and re-typed four times. It is priced in a spreadsheet, issued as a PDF, keyed into purchase orders, and measured against at certification from a different set of numbers. Each transcription is where the figures stop agreeing, and they always do.

What makes a bill usable rather than merely present

• —Structured lines with quantity, unit and rate — addressable objects, not cells
• —Volume groups, so a repeated element is measured once and applied many times
• —A rate library that carries forward between projects instead of dying with the file
• —Rate analysis that shows what a rate is made of — labour, material, plant, margin
• —A direct path from a bill line to a purchase order, with no re-keying
• —Measurement against the same lines at certification

Volume groups save the week

A tower with forty similar floors is not forty measurements. Grouping the repeated volume once and applying it is how take-off stops being transcription — and, more importantly, how a change to that element updates everywhere rather than in thirty-nine places minus the one you missed.

The bill is the spine of the money

It prices the tender, it becomes the purchase orders that buy the work, it is what work in place is measured against for the interim certificate, and it is where variation gets argued. That last one is why history matters: a variation is an argument in advance, and it is won by whoever can produce the original line, the instruction, the measurement and the rate build-up without a search.

What is in the box

Planning & QS, Manager, People, HR, Finance.

What it does not do

• —No on-screen take-off from drawings or PDFs — measurement is entered or imported
• —No quantity extraction from a BIM model
• —No shipped template for every published standard method of measurement; check yours
• —No benchmarking database of market rates — the library is yours, built from your own work

If measurement speed from drawings is your bottleneck, a specialist take-off tool is the better buy and can feed this. If keeping the bill alive and defensible after the tender is your bottleneck, this is the one.