From the Official Price List to the Client Quote, Without Losing the Code
An Italian construction estimate has to cite published price-list codes. Copy those lines into a spreadsheet and the link to the source is gone — which is exactly when someone asks where a number came from.
Construction firms and surveyors · Italy
construction!The Need
Estimating a building job in Italy is not free-form pricing. Line items are drawn from published price lists, each with a code, a description, a unit of measure and a unit price, and the estimate is expected to cite them. The working method is usually a spreadsheet: copy the relevant lines out of the price list, add quantities, total it up, and reformat the result into a client quote. Every one of those copies severs the line from its source. When the price list is revised, nobody knows which estimates are now stale. When a client or an authority queries a figure, the answer is a number in a cell with no provenance. And because the measured bill of quantities and the client-facing quote are separate documents, they drift — the quote says one thing, the measurement behind it says another, and the difference is discovered during the job.
The Approach
We modelled the whole chain as one linked structure rather than three documents. Price lists are held as first-class data — each item carrying its code, description, unit of measure and unit price — and a measured bill of quantities is built by drawing on them, so a line keeps its origin instead of arriving as pasted text. Bills are organised into chapters with explicit ordering, because a construction estimate is read section by section and the order carries meaning. Each line stores its quantity, unit price and resulting amount, so the arithmetic is recorded rather than recomputed differently in each place it appears. The client quote is then derived from the same underlying lines rather than retyped, which is what keeps the measurement and the quote from disagreeing. The whole thing is multi-tenant: organisations own their price lists, projects and clients, and membership decides who sees what, so a firm can work across several projects without material leaking between them.
