Most bills of quantities in the world are prepared in a spreadsheet, and that is not a failure of professional standards. It is a rational response to a tool that is flexible, familiar, universally readable and already paid for.
We sell the alternative, so take this seriously as an admission rather than as politeness. There are things a spreadsheet does that no dedicated BOQ application will match, and if your work is mostly those things you should stay where you are.
| Aspect | Excel | BillMate |
|---|---|---|
| Formula risk | Every total is a formula somebody wrote and nobody re-checks. Inserted rows, deleted rows and copied ranges all break sums silently. | There are no formulas to break. Collections and carried-forward totals are produced from the bill structure, so an inserted item cannot fall outside a total. |
| Retained working dimensions | Possible on a separate sheet, if you are disciplined. Almost never linked back to the item, and lost when someone tidies the workbook. | The dimension sheet is attached to the item permanently. Reopen it from the item; revise a dimension and the cast quantity follows. How it works. |
| Rate build-ups | A block of cells per rate, laid out however the last person laid it out. Copying one to a new item copies its layout, its errors and its assumptions together. | One structure for every rate — material, labour, plant, waste, overheads and profit — so two rates built a year apart are still comparable, and a client questioning one can be walked down it. How rates are built. |
| Rate provenance | A number in a cell. Any record of its origin is a comment somebody chose to write, on a good day. | Source, location, pricing month and verification status travel with every rate, and appear in the CSV export's rate-source column. |
| Rate staleness | Invisible. A 2023 rate and a 2026 rate are identical text. | Flagged after 12 months, in the library and again on the bill. A controlled uplift is recorded as provenance rather than overwriting history. |
| Pagination | Page setup, print areas and repeated header rows, adjusted by hand before every issue — and re-broken by the next edit. | Item-aware. A description never splits across a page break and a rate is never orphaned from its item. See it. |
| Professional exports | A spreadsheet print, or a PDF of one. Your letterhead is a header you maintain. | A paginated, letterheaded document with collections, a carried-forward summary and a basis-of-estimate note. Part of the Pro licence. |
| Local backups | Whatever your file discipline is. Usually good, because the file is visible and you already manage it. | One backup file for everything, with a reminder after 14 days — but the data is in app storage rather than a file you can see, so the discipline matters more, not less. |
| Offline working | Fully offline, assuming a desktop install rather than the browser version. | Fully offline except the AI. A licence key needs a connection once, then re-checks about every 3 days when online, and works with none at all for up to 30 days. |
| Ease of checking | Hard. A checker sees results, not method, and must trust or rebuild every formula. | A checker can read the dimension sheet behind a quantity and the build-up behind a rate, and see which rates are unverified. |
| Import and export | Universal. Everything opens it. This is a real and permanent advantage. | CSV and Excel import for rates; CSV export for the bill and the library. Your data leaves as easily as it arrived — but the bill itself is not an .xlsx. |
Use both, and be deliberate about the boundary.
And if the answer is still Excel, that is a legitimate answer. One or two small bills a year does not justify a new habit. We would rather you used our BOQ structure in your own workbook than bought something you do not need — the structure is on that page, free, with nothing to fill in to get it.
2 projects free, no sign-up. Price something you have already priced in Excel.