If a fit-out job has a spine, it is the bill of quantities. The BOQ is the one document that pricing, procurement, progress measurement, and billing all read from. Get it right and the four functions stay consistent. Get it wrong, and they drift apart in ways nobody notices until money is missing.
The BOQ is not a quote and it is not a drawing. It is a numbered list in which every piece of work on the job has a line.
What a BOQ line actually is
A good BOQ line is four things at once, and all four matter.
| Part | What it tells you | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Item description | What the work is, in words specific enough to recognise on site | Plasterboard partition, 100mm, metal stud, skimmed both faces |
| Quantity | How much of it, in the unit that makes sense for that work | 42 m² |
| Unit | The measure the quantity is counted in | square metre (m²) |
| Rate | The price per unit, including material, labour, and margin | 85.00 per m² |
Multiply the quantity by the rate and you have the line value. Add up every line and you have the job. That simplicity is the whole point. The BOQ turns a building into arithmetic.
Why it rules everything downstream
The reason the BOQ sits at the centre of the job is that four different functions all read from the same numbered list.
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Pricing
The tender is built by filling in rates against the quantities. The total of rate times quantity, line by line, is the price of the job.
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Procurement
Orders are raised against the same items. The marble supplier gets a call for the square metres of stone on line 12; the joiner gets a PO for the units on line 18.
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Progress measurement
At each valuation, the QS walks the site and measures how much of each line is actually complete. Progress is not a feeling — it is a percentage of measured quantity against the BOQ.
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Billing
What is due this month is the measured progress on each line, times its rate. The invoice is the BOQ, partially filled in.
Because all four read from one list, they cannot disagree about what the job is. Take the list away, and pricing lives in one spreadsheet, procurement in another, progress in a foreman’s notebook, and billing in a fourth document. Each is honest on its own. Together they never reconcile.
The vague line, and the argument it breeds
The discipline that protects you is specificity. A good line describes the work well enough that two people standing in front of it, four months apart, will agree on whether it has been done and how much of it counts.
| Vague line (an argument waiting) | Specific line (something you can measure) |
|---|---|
| Joinery — provisional sum | Joinery per drawing DRG-J-03 rev B: 6 no. wardrobes, veneered, 18mm carcase, soft-close hardware |
| Some marble work | Crema Marfil cladding to reception feature wall, 18no. m², polished, installed and sealed |
| Electrical extras | Additional LED downlights, 12W, white, to approved layout — 8 no. |
| Painting | One coat primer, two coats matt emulsion, to existing plastered walls — measured in m² |
The pattern is the same every time. The vague line is short and feels efficient. The specific line is longer and feels like paperwork. The vague line becomes a dispute. The specific line never does.
Units are not a detail
A surprising number of BOQ arguments are about units, not rates. Was the marble priced by the square metre installed, or by the sheet before cutting? Was the painting priced per square metre of wall, or per linear metre of skirting? When the unit is ambiguous, two honest people can measure the same wall and produce two different quantities.
State the unit, in full, on every line. It costs a few words and prevents the most tedious arguments in the industry.
What this looks like in Taskity
The BOQ is modelled as a list of line items on a project, each with a description, a quantity, a unit, and a rate. Procurement, progress, and billing each attach to those same lines, so the four functions can never drift apart. A line that is too vague to price or measure is treated as a line that needs writing properly — not as a box to leave blank.
Check what you learned
1. Why does the BOQ sit at the centre of pricing, procurement, progress, and billing?
Show the answer
Because it is the one numbered list of work that all four functions read from
The BOQ's power is structural, not ceremonial. It is the single list in which every piece of work has a number, a quantity, a unit, and a rate. Pricing is the rate times the quantity. Procurement orders against the same lines. Progress is measured against the same items. Billing reads how much of each line is done. Because all four read from one list, they stay consistent. Without that shared spine, each function keeps its own list and they quietly drift apart.
2. A BOQ line reads "Joinery — provisional sum". Four months later there is a dispute about what was included. What was the original mistake?
Show the answer
The line was too vague to be priced or measured against
A provisional sum is sometimes the honest answer when a piece of work is genuinely not yet defined — the mistake is leaving it vague. "Joinery — provisional sum" tells nobody what joinery, how much, to what spec, or how it will be measured later. Four months on, the contractor remembers one scope and the client another, and both are working from the same useless line. The fix is to define the item well enough to price and to measure, or to break it into lines that are.
Scored quizzes, progress tracking and certificates live inside Taskity.
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