Moving a bill of quantities between estimating packages

Why an exchange format

A bill of quantities rarely stays in one office. The designer works in one package, the contractor prices it in another, the client checks it in a third. Send a PDF and whoever receives it retypes the lot. Send a spreadsheet and the measurement lines are lost, along with the structure that made the bill readable. An exchange format carries items, rates, measurement lines and sections as data, so the work carries on from where you left it.

What a good exchange file carries

The schedule of rates; the bill items with their measurement lines (parts, length, width, height or weight); the sections; and the header data of the job. Anything less and whoever receives the file spends the day checking your arithmetic instead of using it. Formats of this kind are normally XML-based, documented and readable, so a file can be opened and inspected without the software that wrote it.

How it works in Italy: the XPWE format

In Italy the exchange format in common use is XPWE, an XML-based format for bills of quantities and site accounting documents. An .xpwe file holds the schedule of rates, the bill items with their measurements (parts, length, width, height or weight), the sections and the header data of the job. Because it is documented and readable, it has become the standard way Italian estimating packages hand work to each other.

What ComputoLab does

ComputoLab imports and exports bills of quantities in XPWE: you open the files other people send you, and you hand over yours in a format the main estimating packages read (PriMus, for example). The export keeps items, measurement lines, sections and rates.

In practice

From ComputoLab: Export menu → XPWE on the bill, and the file is ready to send. The other way round, you import the .xpwe file you were sent and the bill appears with its measurements, ready to edit or to use for the site accounts. PriMus® is a registered trademark of ACCA software S.p.A., which is not affiliated with ComputoLab and does not sponsor it.

Not only bills: manufacturers' price lists

Some material manufacturers publish their price list in XPWE, with the price analyses already inside: for every item, materials, labour and equipment line by line. ComputoLab imports them as price lists, from the Price lists panel with “Import an XPWE price list”.

From then on the list is consulted like a regional price list, and its analyses open from the item. They remain the publisher's: you read them, you do not edit them. To adapt one, you copy it to your own analyses, where it can be edited.

You download the file from the manufacturer's own site and import it yourself: ComputoLab does not redistribute third-party price lists.