We are a large general domestic builders and shop fitters by trade, we still actively price jobs everyday. Although we are based in the north of England we have worked all over the country on large and small projects and have had plenty of experience in all the areas of pricing and on all types of building.

The buildaprice.co.uk story started 2 years ago when we started to look at a better way of pricing our building jobs, we just did not know which jobs made us money and which ones didn’t, it was all to much “guestimating” and not enough estimating.

There was a number of things we needed from our new system : –

• To be available on as many devices as possible with live data to use instantly, we did not want to be tied to our desks or have to remember to add things to the quotes later.
• To be easy to use, minimal training needed to get up and running.
• To keep things simple, sounds easy!
• To produce quotes and estimate quickly and accurately

We wanted the team to be able to add things on site, too many extras were being forgotten as the job changed on the site, as it invariably does.

When we started looking at existing estimating and costing systems, we realised that most were very old fashioned and not flexible enough for what we wanted to do. Many promised a lot and failed to deliver and it was based on this we decided to develop our own system. We looked at the market and saw that most of the software was based on old systems and excel, computers have moved along way and we wanted to utilise the power and flexibility of these new technology’s. Also many wanted £££’s up front, but then wanted £££’s again every year for “upgrades” and support, this meant paying out money every year to be able to load the software on new machines, worse that that was that most of them could not be used on any other device than a PC. These factors made the decision for us to write our own software.

When we started to build the system and telling there was a lot of interest from other builders and trades people saying that they would also like a system that did what we were planning.

The system has been designed from the ground up to be available on almost any computer. Using web technology enables us to make sure that almost all devices connected to the internet can use the system, this can mean Windows Computers, Apple Macs, Linux, Iphone, Ipads, Android and smart phones. That means when you are on your job you can add those extras into the job at the same time as quoting the customer, this means you won’t forget these things and having to end up paying for the items yourself. You only need an internet connection to use the system.

We have now separated the building company and the software company so that they are separate entities, and although we still work closely with the construction company to tweak the software, you can be sure that all the data you put into the system is held as highly confidential.

Within the subscription free email support included, we usually respond within 4 hours of the email coming into our system.

The on-line storage we use is based on Amazons 2EC cloud, statistically its more likely that your hard drive will fail than the servers we run on failing, however you can take unlimited backups at any time of your whole data.

What we are not…