Prepare a POMI bill of quantities

What POMI is

The RICS Principles of Measurement (International) for Works of Construction is a deliberately brief document, and that brevity is why it travels. Where a national method of measurement runs to hundreds of pages of specific rules, POMI states general principles and short trade rules, leaving the particulars to the contract's preambles. It is widely specified across the Gulf, and in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Its practical consequence for a surveyor is that the preamble does the work. Because POMI itself says less, what a rate is deemed to include is far more often defined in the bill's own preliminaries than in the rule set. A POMI bill lives or dies on descriptive precision.

How BillMate handles it

• A RICS POMI (International) section template — the fifteen work sections below, created at project start.
• With POMI selected, the AI assistant is instructed in its principles-based work sections, item coverage and units, as used outside the UK.
• AED, SAR, KWD, USD and GBP are all supported currencies, each rounded to its own precision — the Kuwaiti dinar shows three decimals.
• Arabic is a supported interface language with a full right-to-left layout.
• Write your preamble items as descriptions in the Preliminaries section and capture them into the rate library, so they travel to the next project rather than being retyped.
• Rate build-ups, provenance and staleness work exactly as they do everywhere else.

What it still does not do. BillMate does not check your measurement against POMI, and it holds no library of standard POMI descriptions. It structures and prices the bill; the measurement and the preambles are yours.

A practical note on the Gulf

If you work between markets — a POMI bill this month, an NRM2 bill next — BillMate holds both projects on the same install with different currencies, different section structures and one shared rate library. The library keeps each rate's locality, so a Dubai rate and a Lagos rate never quietly get mistaken for one another.

The UAE and Gulf market page works all of this through in dirhams: a piling take-off, a hot-weather concrete build-up, a POMI bill and the summary arithmetic with a VAT line on it.

POMI also carries the weight in markets whose own rules are not templated. Neither Ghana nor Kenya has a national method of measurement in BillMate, and on internationally procured work in both countries POMI is what the bill is measured to anyway — so it is the template those two market pages point at, and they say plainly what you do for work in local format.