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Estimating and price libraries

Price from one library,
not five spreadsheets.

Your prices exist. They are just spread across three workbooks, a folder of supplier emails and one estimator's memory. Unibuild holds them as one dated, auditable library that quoting, buying and day works all read from, including what an hour of each of your people actually costs the business.

Book a pricing review → What the estimate then caps
uplift in one action rates effective dated markup snapshotted tendering on it since 2016
What a price file becomes

The rate used to price this
week's job has not been
reviewed since 2023.

It was right when it was set. Nobody has looked at it since, because looking at it is nobody's job.

Two estimators
Started from the same file three years ago. They price the same job eleven per cent apart and neither can explain why.
Inconsistent
The same material
Priced three ways: the estimator's sheet, the supplier's last email, and the order that eventually goes out.
Quoted below cost
The question
What does an hour of an electrician actually cost this business? Nobody can answer it.
Margin is a guess
Fit times
In one person's head. When they are on holiday, the job is not priced.
Tender missed
Annual uplift
Somebody has to open every workbook and edit every line. In practice it does not happen.
Drifts each year
When a rate is updated
It is overwritten. The old value is gone, so last year's reported margin was never real.
History moves
The underlying issue A spreadsheet cannot tell you when a price was last reviewed, or by whom Everything else follows from that
What is in the module

Six things a shared library
does that a workbook cannot.

One item
database

01

Plant, materials and access equipment in one categorised catalogue, each item carrying its cost, its charge rate, its unit and the time it takes to fit.

  • A two level category tree, so a stranger can find a fitting
  • Fit time, task time and strip out time on the item
  • Units of measure as a maintained list, not free text
  • Everyone prices from the same file
One price, not five opinionsLive

Prices from
several suppliers

02

A material can hold a price from every supplier who quotes for it, each with that supplier's own part number, and one flagged as the default.

  • The default is what every other screen reads
  • Switching source is one action, not a search and replace
  • The buyer sees alternatives against the item
  • Rather than searching an inbox
Buying with evidenceLive

Uplift in
one action

03

Move an entire price list, or one category inside it, by a percentage from a single box. Creating a list clones the catalogue at current prices, so it starts as a true copy.

  • An annual review becomes a five minute job
  • Which means it actually happens
  • Different clients can be priced from different lists
  • Without anybody maintaining a second catalogue
The review that gets doneLive

Drift you
can see

04

Every price list line shows the percentage by which it differs from the base catalogue price, coloured green above and red below.

  • A list that has quietly fallen behind announces itself
  • Rather than being discovered by losing money on a job
  • Visible per line and per category
  • Not something a spreadsheet can ever surface
Made visible, not calculatedLive

Dated labour
costs

05

Each person's hourly cost is held with an effective from date, and the rate in force on the day worked is stamped onto the timesheet line as it is saved.

  • A pay rise in April does not rewrite March's job costs
  • Eighteen people carry more than one dated rate in live use
  • Which is exactly where a single mutable field corrupts history
  • You can answer what an hour actually costs
Last quarter's margin stops movingLive

Kits for
repeat work

06

Bundle the materials, plant, sundries, fit times and markup for an assembly you install regularly into one pickable line.

  • A running fit time total as you build it
  • Per line markup inside the kit
  • Shared between estimating and stores
  • The tenth installation costs the same effort as the first
Built once, used twiceLive
The detail estimators notice

Markup is snapshotted onto
the estimate when it is created.

Which means a rate change next month cannot alter a tender you already issued. It is a small mechanism and it is the difference between a price file and a pricing system.

Markup classes, taken at creation
The markup applied to an estimate is captured onto that estimate at the moment it is built. Change the class afterwards and every tender already sent is unaffected. Without this, a routine housekeeping edit silently rewrites what you quoted somebody last week.
Per line locking
A line can be locked so a bulk repricing pass leaves it alone. That is what makes an annual uplift usable on a live library: the negotiated rates you fought for are not casually overwritten by a percentage applied to everything.
Sectional build ups
An estimate is a schedule of sections rather than a flat list, priced from your own catalogues and price lists, with kits pricing a whole assembly on one line. Sections are what make an estimate comparable against the actual afterwards, and what make a claim capable of being capped.
Templates and autofill
An estimate structure saved once and imported into the next job of the same type. Institutional pricing knowledge accumulated over years, which is the thing no new system can hand you and the reason a decade old library is worth migrating carefully.
Estimate against actual
The loop closes: a discrepancy view compares estimated hours against hours logged, and estimated quantities against quantities used, section by section. That is how the next tender gets priced from what the last job cost rather than from a percentage uplift on a guess.
The library's own completeness
A page counts every item still missing a fit time, a purchase price, a retail price, a labour rate or a task time, and lets each gap be filled inline. Your price file's quality becomes a number a director can chase rather than a feeling somebody has.
Why this exists Because a business tendering measured work lost money each of these ways And then had it fixed properly
Estimator working through pricing at a desk
86Dated hourly cost records across 63 people
18People carrying more than one dated rate
222Plant items across 178 categories

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026. Estimating volumes for the site services deployment, where the full engine runs, are being collected.

Which deployment proves what

Two businesses use this
module completely differently,
so here is the split.

This is the page where attributing a claim to the wrong system would be most damaging, so we have set it out rather than blurring it.

Proven in site services since 2016

The estimating build upNamed price listsBulk repricing and per line lockingMarkup classes snapshottedKitsDay work rate cardsEstimate templatesEstimate versus actual

Proven in construction since 2023

The plant catalogueMulti supplier material pricingSupplier part numbersEffective dated labour cost historyUnits of measureThe completeness report

Deliberately not used in construction

The material sell price libraryNamed price listsMarkup classesKits
Why one business chose not to populate a price library

The construction contractor prices quotations by typing the rate, and maintains its plant register in full instead. That is a legitimate choice for a firm whose work is mostly labour and specified equipment rather than materials take off, and the platform does not force one on you. We mention it because it is the honest answer to a question you would otherwise ask in month two, and because it demonstrates the point the whole platform rests on: the library is available, not compulsory.

What it does not do

Four things, and the first
one is about your effort
rather than our software.

01
Loading a price library takes real client effort
Any supplier who tells you otherwise is selling. Your existing file is mapped to categories, units and suppliers, imported, and then reviewed by somebody who knows the trade. What Unibuild does is measure the result for you, so completeness is a number you can chase rather than a feeling. But the reviewing is yours and it is the part that decides whether the library is any good.
02
No supplier price feed or catalogue import
There is no live feed from a merchant and no trade catalogue import. Prices are maintained inside the platform. For an M&E contractor working from large merchant catalogues this is a common expectation and a well defined piece of implementation work, so it is worth scoping early rather than discovering later.
03
No client facing schedule of rates document
If a framework agreement or a measured term contract requires you to issue a version controlled schedule of rates as a contract deliverable, that document does not exist today. Adding a price list output with a version number is contained work, and it should be raised at scoping if your contracts need it.
04
No price change approval step
Every price change carries who made it and when, in the same audit columns used across the platform, so nothing is untraceable. What there is not is an approval gate above a percentage threshold. The approvals mechanism the platform already runs for purchase orders and subcontract orders has no pricing type today, so this would be an extension rather than a switch.

Everything in the six cards above has priced a tendering business since 2016. These four are the honest edges.

Questions

Asked by whoever prices
your work.

We already have a price file in Excel. Why move it?+
Because a spreadsheet does not tell you when a price was last reviewed, does not tell you who changed it, does not hold three suppliers' prices for the same part, and stops working the week the person who built it is on holiday. Unibuild holds the same information with a date, an owner and a change history, and lets you move a whole list by a percentage in one action. The spreadsheet is the starting point for the migration rather than the enemy.
Will it price our work from our own rate library?+
Yes, and one of the two businesses running on Unibuild has done exactly that since 2016. Estimates are built as a schedule of sections, priced from your own catalogues and price lists, with kits that price a whole assembly in one line, markup snapshotted onto the estimate when it is created so a later rate change cannot alter a tender already sent, and per line locking so a bulk reprice leaves negotiated rates alone.
Can different clients have different prices?+
Yes. Named price lists hold the same catalogue at different rates, so a framework client and a one off client can be priced from separate lists without anyone maintaining a second copy of the catalogue. Each list can be moved as a whole, or category by category, independently of the others.
What happens to our old job costs when we put wages up?+
Nothing, and that is the entire point of holding rates with an effective from date and stamping the rate in force onto the timesheet line when it is saved. In one deployment eighteen people carry more than one dated rate, and their historic job costs still price at the rate that applied at the time. Without this, awarding a rise in April quietly increases what January's jobs appear to have cost, and every margin you reported was wrong.
Do we have to price everything from the library?+
No. The library is available rather than compulsory, and we have a live example either way. One business runs its entire tendering operation on a structured price library and has since 2016. The other prices quotations by typing the rate and maintains its plant register in full instead, because its work is mostly labour and specified equipment. Both are legitimate and the platform does not force one on you.
Can we control who sees cost prices?+
This is worth discussing properly during scoping rather than assuming. Access is granted page by page and cost data sits on specific pages rather than being scattered across the system, so it is controllable. Exactly which roles should see purchase prices, supplier prices and hourly labour costs is a decision to make at implementation, and it is usually the first question a commercial manager asks. On onsite quotes specifically, site level roles are already served a document with no prices on it at all.
How much work is it to load our prices?+
Honestly, this is the part of an implementation that takes real client effort, and any supplier who tells you otherwise is selling. Loading a catalogue is a data exercise: your existing file is mapped to categories, units and suppliers, imported, and then reviewed. Unibuild helps by measuring the result, because a page counts every item still missing a fit time, a price or a rate, so completeness is something you can chase rather than something you hope about.
Next step

Bring the workbook
everyone prices from.

The point Nobody has to give up the way they price, only the five copies of it That is the whole exercise
Book a pricing review → What the estimate then caps
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Email
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Closing the loop
Cost control
Demo calendar
unibuild.co.uk/demo