Case Study

Rear Extension

Balham, London

Project type

Rear and side extension

Contract value

£183,000

Programme

24 weeks

Valuations

6, four-weekly

Dan F. runs a design-and-build firm doing extensions across South West London. His bottleneck was never the building, it was the tendering: every quote meant a weekend taking off quantities from the architect's drawings and formatting a document that looked professional enough to justify the price.

On the client side, Priya S., a former QS working as a client-side project manager, was running the job for the homeowners. She had one requirement above all: no surprises. Her clients were living in the house through the works with two children and a fixed budget.

The quote that won the job

Dan built his tender in BuildFlow's Quote Builder. He uploaded the architect's drawings and the AI extracted a structured bill of quantities: demolition, groundworks, structure, envelope, first and second fix, all broken into priced sections. He adjusted rates, added his prelims and sent a branded PDF quote from the platform in two days instead of two weekends.

Priya later told him the quote was why he was shortlisted: it was the only tender her clients could actually read, line by line, and compare against the drawings.

From quote to contract in one click

When the clients accepted, the quote converted directly into the live contract. The same BoQ that priced the job became the document the job was administered against: no retyping, no transposition errors, no 'the quote said something different' at month three.

Dan applied for payment every four weeks against those sections. Priya reviewed and certified from her dashboard, and both sides were emailed at every step: application submitted, valuation under review, certificate issued, payment made.

“The Quote Builder pays for the platform on its own. Drawings in, priced bill out, and the client gets a document that looks like it came from a firm ten times our size. Then the quote just becomes the contract. I used to retype everything into a spreadsheet after winning a job and pray I hadn't fat-fingered a rate.”

Dan F.

Director, design-and-build contractor

Extensions and refurbishments, SW London

Invoices that reconcile themselves

Each time Priya marked a valuation as paid, the linked invoice in the project's invoice hub updated automatically, so the account stayed reconciled without anyone maintaining a separate ledger. Her monthly cost reports to the homeowners came straight off the dashboard: certified to date, paid to date, retention held, variations approved, all against the original contract sum.

48 hrs

From architect's drawings to a priced quote

BoQ from tender to final account

Invoices matched to payments automatically

“I spent years as a QS watching tenders and contracts drift apart until nobody knew what was agreed. Here the bill Dan tendered on is the bill I certified against for six months. My clients saw exactly where every pound went, in an app, without me building a single spreadsheet. That is how small works contracts should run.”

Priya S.

Client-side Project Manager, former QS

Acting for private homeowners