Solution for Construction
The cheapest bid excluded the crane.
Levelling a package is not really about the numbers. It is about finding the four lines in each bid where a scope was quietly handed to somebody else, and those lines are phrased differently in every submission. Ragextract reads the bids once and puts the exclusions in a column.
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| Row | Documents | Scope exclusions | Hourly rate | Lead time | Crane included |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meridian Steel bid.pdf | Fire protection; surveying; temporary works | £58/hr erector, £71/hr foreman | 14 weeks on primary sections | Yes | |
| Falcon Fabrication bid.pdfAddendum 1.pdf | Fire protection; grouting; crane; out-of-hours | £52/hr erector | 10 weeks, subject to mill confirmation | No | |
| Kestrel Structures bid.pdf | Surveying; connection design | £61/hr all trades | 16 weeks | Yes | |
| Ashfield Erectors bid.pdf | Not stated | £49/hr erector | Not stated | Not stated |
A comparison you can hand to the client.
The levelling sheet is a document somebody has to stand behind at an award meeting. “I think that one excludes the crane” is not a position; a cell that opens the page of the addendum it was read from is.
Every answer carries its page and a confidence score, so checking is aimed at the two or three bids where something looks off rather than at all twelve. When a subcontractor disputes how their bid was read, the citation is the answer.
| Document | Quoted rate | Crane and rigging |
|---|---|---|
| Falcon Fabrication +1 | £52/hr — the lowest of four | Excluded, by others |
A bid is a bid plus everything that changed it.
Addenda, clarification responses and revised schedules land after the bid and quietly undo parts of it. Read as separate rows they double-count the package; read separately from the bid they leave a table that is confidently out of date.
Bundle each bid with its addenda, most recent first, and the bundle is the row. A bundle holds up to fifteen documents and the first three are included in the column’s rate, which covers almost every bid you will assemble.
Where it fits.
A row is one submission for one package. Bids for different packages belong in different tables — they are not comparable, and putting them together says they are.
| The work | What a row is |
|---|---|
| Levelling a trade package | A bid, with its addenda and clarifications |
| Subcontract award review | A subcontract, with its variation orders |
| Procurement lead-time tracking | A bid or a supplier quotation |
| Tender clarification logs | A clarification response |
One column answers with pictures rather than prose: it pulls the drawings a bid references into the row, each citing the page it came from. Bids name their drawings three different ways — by title, by sheet number, or not at all — so a text column here returns three kinds of answer that cannot be compared, and pictures can be. What it saves is the slow part: finding which of twelve bids attached a detail at all.
It surfaces drawings; it does not read them. No dimension, area or count comes out of that column. Ragextract reads what a document says — it does not measure drawings, and it is not a takeoff tool.
The preset ships in the application and its prompts are illustrative starting points, not a scope definition — they are meant to be edited to fit the package you are letting. Subcontractor trade bids works the whole thing through.
Levelling a package ends when it is awarded. The certificates, insurance schedules and compliance packs it generates afterwards keep arriving, and that is the operations page.
Cheap enough to do per package.
Twelve bids is a few hundred pages, and reading them is charged once. That is the difference between levelling every package properly and levelling the two big ones properly and the rest on a Friday afternoon.
| One trade package | Volume | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 12 trade bids, 40 pages each — read once | 480 pages | 480 credits |
| 3 typed questions asked of all 12 | 36 cells | 144 credits |
| The drawings each bid references | 12 cells | 48 credits |
| Scope exclusions, as a list column | 12 cells | 144 credits |
Nothing on this page is commercial or contractual advice, and the preset is not a scope definition.
Start with the pile you already have.
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