WorkflowRate library
Import limit8 MB CSV or Excel
Stale after12 months
In the free tierYes, entirely

Turn past schedules into a rate library that improves with every job

You already have the rates. They are scattered across old priced bills, in workbooks named after clients, with nothing recording which city or which year. Here is how to turn that into something that compounds.

Try this workflow free Or build a rate from scratch
Written byThe BillMate product teamProduct and documentation
Last reviewed
Correctionssupport@billmate.site

Why a pile of old bills is not a rate library

A rate library is not a list of numbers. It is a list of numbers that each know four things about themselves: what unit they are in, where they were priced, when, and by what means. Strip any one of those away and what remains is folklore.

This matters more in Nigeria than in most markets. A naira rate from 2023 is not a naira rate from 2026 in any meaningful sense, and a Lekki rate is not an Ibadan rate. A library that does not carry location and date is not merely incomplete — it is actively misleading, because it looks authoritative.

The workflow

From an old workbook to a working library.

Seven steps. The first is the only one that takes real time, and you only do it once.

  1. Export the old schedule to CSV or ExcelWhatever you have — a priced bill, a rate sheet, a supplier's schedule. Up to 8 MB. It does not need cleaning first; the mapping step handles a messy file better than you can by hand.
  2. Map the columns, onceTell BillMate which column is the description, which is the unit, which is the rate. If the file carries a location or a date column, map those too — they are the two most valuable fields and the two most often missing.
  3. Let it match descriptionsFuzzy matching pairs incoming descriptions against what is already in the library, so "225mm hollow blockwork" and "Blockwork, 225 mm hollow sandcrete blocks" are recognised as the same item rather than becoming two entries that slowly diverge.
  4. Check the units and the dimensional senseThis is the step that saves you. Before accepting a match, BillMate checks that the units agree and that the figure is dimensionally plausible for the item. A m² rate landing against a m³ quantity is the classic silent error, and it is caught here rather than in the total.
  5. Supply the location and the dateIf the file did not carry them, set them for the import: the city the schedule was priced in and the month it was priced. Guessing a month is better than leaving it blank — an approximate date still lets staleness work.
  6. Review what came inEverything older than 12 months arrives flagged stale. That is not a failure of the import; it is the import telling you the truth about a 2024 schedule.
  7. Uplift what is worth upliftingA controlled percentage applied across the schedule, recorded as provenance rather than overwriting the original. The rate is then honest about being an uplifted 2024 rate rather than passing as a fresh 2026 one.
What it looks like afterwards

Every rate, with its provenance attached.

A Nigerian rate library after import and capture
Rate library extract: description, unit, rate, location, month priced, source and currency status.
Description Unit Rate Location Priced Source Status
Excavate trench n.e. 1.50 m deep, deposit spoil on site m³ ₦4,500 Lagos — Lekki 2026-05 Priced tender Current
225 mm hollow sandcrete blockwork in walls, 1:6 mortar m² ₦8,200 Lagos — Ikeja 2026-06 Priced tender Current
Reinforced concrete grade 25 in ground beams m³ ₦182,400 Lagos — Lekki 2026-04 Own build-up Current
High-yield reinforcement, 12 mm, cut, bent and fixed kg ₦2,350 Abuja — Gwarinpa 2025-02 Priced tender Stale
Sawn formwork to sides of ground beams m² ₦6,800 Port Harcourt 2024-11 Subcontract quote Stale
Aluminium roofing sheet, 0.55 mm, long span, fixed m² ₦13,500 Ibadan 2026-06 AI draft Unverified

Illustrative rates for the cities and months shown, not current market evidence. Two entries here are flagged stale and one is an unverified AI draft — which is the library doing its job. How provenance and staleness are recorded.

The uplift question, honestly

Applying a percentage to last year's schedule is the most common way Nigerian practices keep a library alive, and it is defensible as far as it goes. It is worth being precise about how far that is.

What an uplift does well

  • Keeps a large schedule usable for early-stage estimating without re-pricing several hundred items.
  • Applies one stated, recorded assumption rather than a hundred unstated ones.
  • Preserves the relative structure of the schedule, which is often more reliable than any individual rate in it.
  • Leaves the original visible in the provenance, so the uplift can be reversed or re-argued.

What it cannot do

  • Correct for constituents that moved differently. Cement, reinforcement and diesel do not track each other, and a blanket percentage assumes they did.
  • Correct for a change in method or supply chain — an item now bought as a subcontract package is not the item that was in the schedule.
  • Make an uplifted rate into evidence. It remains an extrapolation, and BillMate records it as one.
  • Substitute for re-pricing the ten items that carry most of the value. Uplift the tail; re-price the head.

That is why the uplift is recorded rather than applied silently. A rate that says "2024 tender, uplifted 34% in 2026" can be argued with. A rate that has quietly become a 2026 rate cannot.

The compounding part

Capture from every bill you price

The import is the one-off. The habit is capture: when a job closes, capture its rates back into the library. They arrive carrying that project's city and month automatically, which is the whole reason the library gets better rather than just bigger.

After three or four jobs the library starts answering most of a new bill in one action, and what is left is the genuinely new work — which is where your time should have been going all along.

  • Apply the library across a whole bill in one action
  • Capture rates back from a priced bill, with location and date attached
  • Export the whole library to CSV — it is yours, and it leaves as easily as it arrived
  • Restoring a backup merges libraries rather than overwriting, so moving between devices never costs you rates

All of this is free. The complete rate library — import, apply, capture, uplift, export — is in the free tier. The licence buys the exported bill, not the library.

Library operations
Import CSV or ExcelFree
Apply to a whole billFree
Capture from a priced billFree
Percentage upliftFree
Export library to CSVFree
Stale-rate flaggingFree
Export the finished billPro licence

Import one old schedule and see what you already have.

The whole rate library is free. It is the part that compounds.

Try this workflow freeView a sample BOQ