The ASAQS trades ship as a template. Take off walls off a plan, build a rate that carries the generator as well as the bricklayer, price preliminaries in the three parts a JBCC bill adjusts them in, and issue the document — offline, for one payment.
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The established South African measurement and bill-production packages are good, and the larger practices already run them. If your work is drawing-led measurement at volume, buy one — we say so on the comparison page.
BillMate is for the rest of it: the sole practitioner, the two-partner practice, the contractor's estimator pricing a bill that arrived as a PDF. It turns a measure you already have into a properly structured trade bill, in rand, without an annual per-seat renewal — and it keeps working through a four-hour outage, because it does not need the internet and neither does your laptop battery.
The Standard System of Measuring Building Work, published by the Association of South African Quantity Surveyors, has a strong trade orientation, and a South African bill has a recognisable shape because of it: Earthworks, then Concrete and formwork, then Masonry, then Roof coverings, and so on down the 17 trades.
That shape matters commercially, not just editorially. A trade bill is the document a subcontractor prices — you send the masonry contractor Bill No. 3 and nothing else, and the numbers that come back are directly comparable between tenderers because everyone priced the same trade in the same order. An elemental cost plan cannot be cut up that way, which is why the two documents coexist rather than compete.
What BillMate will not claim. It does not check your measurement against the Standard System, and it holds no library of standard ASAQS descriptions. It structures and prices the bill; the measurement, the preambles and the responsibility stay with the surveyor. The full position.
The most South African thing about a South African bill. A blanket percentage cannot survive a variation order or an extension of time; a three-way split can, because each part moves for a different reason.
| Preliminaries item | Basis | Fixed | Value-related | Time-related |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site establishment, setting up and removal on completion | Once | R186,000 | — | — |
| Site offices, stores and ablutions — erect and dismantle | Once | R64,000 | — | — |
| Contract insurances, guarantees and construction guarantee | 1.35% of value | — | R116,775 | — |
| Contractor's site staff and supervision | R42,500 / month | — | — | R382,500 |
| Site offices, stores and ablutions — running costs | R9,800 / month | — | — | R88,200 |
| Water, electricity and standby generation | R14,200 / month | — | — | R127,800 |
| Security, hoarding and protection of the works | R11,500 / month | — | — | R103,500 |
| Small plant, tools and scaffolding | R8,600 / month | — | — | R77,400 |
| Carried to the summary — R1,146,175, or 13.25% of the contract value | R250,000 | R116,775 | R779,400 | |
Illustrative preliminaries for a R8,650,000 contract over 9 months, 25 August 2026 — an illustration of the structure, not a benchmark. Every figure is calculated from the contract value and the programme rather than typed, so changing the period moves the time-related column and nothing else, which is exactly the point. Why it is split: the fixed charge is incurred once whatever happens — you establish the site and you take it away again. The value-related charge follows the contract sum, so a variation that adds work adds insurance and guarantee cost with it. The time-related charge follows the programme, so an extension of time entitles the contractor to more site staff, more security and more generator diesel, and to none of the other two. Priced as one lump at 13.25%, none of those adjustments can be made honestly by either side.
You rarely have elevations when you need the wall quantity. You do have a plan, a perimeter and a storey height — and the girth adjustment that turns the first into a measurable length.
| Times | Dimensions | Squaring | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 41.12 2.85 |
117.19 | External walls, storey height, floor level to underside of roof. Centre-line girth 41.12 — the external perimeter of 42.00 less four corners at one wall thickness each, which is the adjustment a rectangle always takes. | |
| 5/ | 1.50 1.20 |
9.00 | Deduct five window openings, 1500 × 1200. Timesing 5/ — one measurement, five identical openings. |
| 2.40 2.10 |
5.04 | Deduct the sliding door opening to the patio. | |
| 0.90 2.10 |
1.89 | Deduct the front door opening. | |
| Cast into the bill | 101.26 | m² | |
The first line is the one worth reading twice. An external perimeter of 42.00 is not the length of the wall — measured on its centre line a rectangle loses one wall thickness at each of its four corners, so 42.00 becomes 41.12 before anything is multiplied by anything. Get that wrong and every masonry quantity in the bill is wrong by about two per cent, in the direction that favours the contractor. The sheet keeps the working, so six months later the query is answered by opening it rather than by measuring the job again. The full walkthrough, including measuring on screen from an image of the drawing.
Two of these lines would not appear in a European build-up at all. They are not padding — they are what the work actually costs here.
| Constituent | Quantity | Unit | Cost | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Material Clay stock bricks — 110 per m², including 5% breakage | 115.50 | nr | R2.35 | R271.43 |
| Material Cement, 42.5N, for mortar — including 10% waste | 0.34 | bag | R118 | R40.12 |
| Material Building sand, screened | 0.06 | m³ | R420 | R25.20 |
| Material Brickforce, built in every fourth course | 1.60 | m | R6.80 | R10.88 |
| Labour Bricklayer — lay, joint and point | 2.00 | hr | R42 | R84 |
| Labour Labourer — mix mortar, load out and move scaffold | 2.20 | hr | R28 | R61.60 |
| Plant Mortar mixer — hire and fuel | 0.25 | hr | R34 | R8.50 |
| Plant Standby generator and diesel — load-shedding allowance | 1.00 | item | R9.40 | R9.40 |
| Plant Tubular scaffold — hire, erect and strike, apportioned | 1.00 | m² | R18.50 | R18.50 |
| Net cost | R529.63 | |||
| Overheads and establishment charges, 10% | R52.96 | |||
| Profit and risk, 15% on net cost plus overheads | R87.39 | |||
| Unit rate per m² | R669.98 | |||
Illustrative constituent costs for Johannesburg, 25 August 2026. These are an illustration of the method and are not current market prices — re-price every line against your own suppliers before use. BillMate's default 10% overheads and 15% profit are applied here; because the preliminaries above are priced separately, they are correctly absent from this rate.
The load-shedding allowance is a real cost and it belongs where a checker can see it, not buried in the labour rate. A mixer that stops mid-batch wastes the batch; a site that cannot run tools for four hours pays the gang anyway. Some surveyors carry it in preliminaries as part of standby generation instead — that is a defensible choice, and the only indefensible one is carrying it in both places. The scaffold line is here for the same reason: it is apportioned per square metre and shown, rather than smeared across the trade. Whichever way you decide, decide it once and write it into your preambles.
Continuous with everything above it: item 3.01 carries the quantity the dimension sheet cast and the rate the build-up arrived at.
| Item | Description | Unit | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.01 | One-brick (220 mm) walls in clay stock bricks in class II mortar; external walls, storey height | m² | 101.26 | R669.98 | R67,842.17 |
| 3.02 | Half-brick (110 mm) walls in clay stock bricks in class II mortar; internal partitions | m² | 168.40 | R384.50 | R64,749.80 |
| 3.03 | Extra over one-brick walls for face brickwork externally, pointed with a weathered joint | m² | 74.60 | R246 | R18,351.60 |
| 3.04 | Damp-proof course, 375 micron embossed polyethylene, 220 mm wide, built in horizontally | m | 88.40 | R58.60 | R5,180.24 |
| 3.05 | Building in standard pressed steel door frames, 813 × 2032 mm, including filling frame solid | nr | 14 | R186 | R2,604 |
| 3.06 | Precast concrete sills, 220 × 75 mm, bedded, jointed and pointed in cement mortar | m | 26.40 | R214 | R5,649.60 |
| 3.07 | Provisional sum for engineering brickwork below damp-proof course, to be expended as directed | sum | 1 | R68,000 | R68,000 |
| Carried to collection | R232,377.41 | ||||
Illustrative project and illustrative rates. Item 3.03 is measured extra over — the face brickwork is not a separate wall, it is the difference between the wall already measured and the better one actually built, which is why the rate looks small next to 3.01 and why measuring it as a full wall would double-count the structure. One rate in this extract is an AI draft and is marked as one, on screen and on the exported document, which also counts them. The same page for three markets.
Haulage from the brickworks, labour availability, site access and the local subcontract market differ enough across the country that a single national rate is a fiction. BillMate records the location on every rate.
General observations about how these markets differ, not price data. BillMate publishes no South African rate index — your library is the price basis, and we explain why.
| Description | Unit | Rate | Location | Priced | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-brick (220 mm) walls in clay stock bricks, class II mortar | m² | R669.98 | Johannesburg — Midrand | 2026-06 | Own build-up | Current |
| Ditto, same specification | m² | R724.40 | Cape Town | 2026-05 | Priced tender | Current |
| Half-brick (110 mm) walls in clay stock bricks | m² | R384.50 | Johannesburg — Midrand | 2026-06 | Priced tender | Current |
| Extra over one-brick walls for face brickwork, weathered joint | m² | R246 | Durban | 2026-04 | Subcontract quote | Current |
| Precast concrete sills, 220 × 75 mm, bedded and pointed | m | R214 | Johannesburg — Midrand | 2026-06 | AI draft | Unverified |
| Structural steelwork, universal beams, fabricated and erected | t | R34,800 | Gqeberha | 2024-11 | Priced tender | Stale |
Two entries here are the same wall specification priced in different cities, and they sit side by side rather than averaging into a number that is true nowhere. One is an unverified AI draft and says so. One is flagged stale at 12 months — and a 2024 steel rate is exactly the kind of figure that will lose you money quietly. Illustrative rates, not market evidence — how the library works.
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Every market above has a page of its own, and two of them say plainly that no national method of measurement ships for them — see what "localised" means here.
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