Run a construction project on VEXORS
How a main contractor takes one master Bill of Quantities from import to a priced, marked-up client bill: the project cockpit, its four tabs, trade packages, project documents, and the full buy-out loop.
What you'll learn
- Understand what a project (master BoQ) is and when to start one
- Turn on construction features and start a project from any of its entry points
- Read the project cockpit: four tabs, KPIs, the progress strip, and the what's-next guide
- Close the loop by recording the project outcome with your client
You won the project. Now you have to buy it out: take the client's Bill of Quantities, tender each trade to subcontractors, hold the prices together as bids arrive, and hand your client one priced bill with your margin in it. Most contractors run that in a folder of spreadsheets that stops being trustworthy about a week in.
A project on VEXORS replaces the folder. One master Bill of Quantities holds the whole job. You split it into trade packages, each package tenders to suppliers as its own request, and every award rolls its pricing back onto the master automatically. When the buy-out is done, you review the commercial position, add your markup, and export one client bill issued under your own company name.
Why this matters
The hard part of a buy-out is not any single tender. It is keeping fifty decisions consistent: which lines went to which trade, which packages came back priced, what the committed total is against your budget, which drawings each trade received, and what the client bill must show. The master BoQ is the single place where all of that lives, updated by the tendering itself rather than by someone retyping numbers on a Friday evening.
The shape of the workflow
A project runs through six stages. Each has its own guide; this page shows how they connect.
| Stage | What happens | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Build the master BoQ | Import the client's workbook or build the bill in the wizard, with construction fields: item codes, sub-sections, line types, quantity bases. | Import your BoQ from a spreadsheet |
| 2. Load the project documents | Upload the spec book and drawing sets once, as files or a whole folder. Every trade package later picks the sections, pages, or sheets it needs. | Manage project documents and drawings |
| 3. Split into trade packages | Group BoQ lines by trade. Each package becomes its own tender with its own suppliers, documents, and deadline. | Split into trade packages |
| 4. Tender and award | Packages run as normal requests: bids, Q&A, AI evaluation and recommendation, awards. Pricing rolls back onto the master as you go. | Split into trade packages |
| 5. Review the commercial position | Check pricing quality, budget against committed cost per package, supplier concentration, and unresolved flags. Generate a settlement brief before you commit. | Review the commercial position |
| 6. Price what's left, mark up, and export | Self-price the work your own crews will do, set markup and preliminaries, export the client bill, and record the project outcome. | Price, mark up, and bill your client |
Before you start
- Projects need the Scale plan. Scale Splitting a BoQ into trade packages, the project document library, and the Construction bill toggle itself are Scale features. Suppliers always bid free, on every plan.
- The request must be marked as construction. If you import a full BoQ workbook, construction features turn on automatically. Otherwise you turn them on yourself in the wizard (see below), or accept the wizard's proposal when it detects construction content.
- Have the client's Bill of Quantities file ready if you have one. The import guide covers everything from a clean single sheet to a messy multi-sheet workbook.
- Have the spec book and drawing sets to hand as PDFs. You can load them at any point, but loading them before you split means the AI package drafter can read the right specification sections for each trade.
Construction features: what "marked as construction" adds
A construction request carries fields a general RFQ does not need. In the wizard's BoQ step, the Construction bill toggle ("Adds retention, advance payment, bid/performance bonds, and BoQ sub-grouping for construction tenders") adds:
- Retention % and Advance payment %: the commercial terms every subcontractor prices against.
- Bid bond and Performance bond: each as a percentage or a fixed amount.
- Measurement standard: the standard your quantities follow, so suppliers measure the same way you did.
- BoQ structure: sub-sections, Item code, Line type (Measured, Provisional Sum, PC Sum, Preliminaries, Daywork), Quantity basis (Firm quantity, Provisional quantity, Rate only), Dimension shape for lines with structured dimensions, and a Nominated subcontractor field where a line is to be carried out by a named party. The construction pricing reference explains every one of them.
- Bid response format per section: Itemized required (every line priced individually) or One price for the section (breakdown required) (one section price with a priced breakdown behind it that reconciles to it).
- Under Conditions of Tender, the Part bids rule: Full scope required, Part bids accepted, or Not stated. This decides whether a supplier may decline a whole section or bid a reduced quantity.
VEXORS also detects construction content on its own. Importing a full BoQ workbook turns construction mode on. Picking a construction category, or writing a bill whose lines read like construction work, proposes it. Your own choice always wins: once you set the toggle yourself, nothing changes it silently.
Turning the toggle off opens Turn off construction bill?. Confirming with Turn off and clear clears retention, advance payment, bonds, the measurement standard, sub-sections and item codes, and any rate-only, provisional-quantity, or dimension values on your lines. The dialog counts the affected lines before you confirm, and the clearing cannot be undone.
Starting a project
A project starts from a construction request that has a Bill of Quantities. There are three ways in:
From the wizard: Save & start project
On a construction bill that qualifies, the wizard footer offers Save & start project next to the ordinary save. It saves the request as a master and takes you straight to the project cockpit. You do not publish a master; the master itself never goes to suppliers, only its packages do. A Planning to run this as a project? card on the BoQ step explains the same thing.
From the request page: Start a project
On a construction request's page, use Start a project (also shown as Split into Trade Packages). Requests that qualify show a Project ready chip in your requests list.
If the request is not marked as construction yet, the button opens Start a project? instead: it explains that projects are only available for construction requests and offers Open construction settings or Not now. Nothing is turned on without you.
Once a request is a master, the same spot shows Open trade packages. Until you create the first package you can also choose Turn back into an ordinary request, which makes it a single tender again ("This is an ordinary request again. You can publish it as a single tender."). After the first package exists, that option is gone.
Finding your projects later
The requests list has a Projects filter that shows only masters, with an Outcome filter (All, Not declared, or a specific outcome). A master's card shows Split into N packages; each package links back with Part of plus the project name, and a Back to cockpit link when you are inside one.
The master request page
The master is still a request, so it has the request page you know, with two things ordinary requests do not have:
- A Documents tab: the project document library, where spec books and drawing sets are uploaded once and every trade package picks from them. On plans below Scale the tab is shown locked with an explanation. Covered in Manage project documents and drawings.
- The Open trade packages action that leads to the cockpit.
Each package, being a normal request, also has its own Q&A tab where bidders ask clarification questions and you publish answers to every bidder at once. See Run Q&A and announcements.
Reading the project cockpit
The cockpit is the Trade Packages page of a master. It has four tabs:
- Split: the master BoQ with every line's assignment, and the package cards. This is where you create packages, attach documents to them, publish them, set deadlines, and release lines back to unassigned. Covered in Split into trade packages.
- Consolidated: the roll-up. Every line with its current best price, your own rate where you self-price, your budget against committed cost, and the client bill preview. A badge on the tab counts package lines that will not be billed until you link them. Covered in Price, mark up, and bill your client.
- Commercial Review: the pre-commitment check. Pricing quality across the whole bill, budget versus committed by package, supplier concentration, unresolved flags, and the AI settlement brief. A badge on the tab counts flags still unresolved. Covered in Review the commercial position.
- Billing History: every client bill you have exported from this master, permanently, with the figures that were billed.
Above the tabs sit Pricing settings and four KPIs, each with a one-line sublabel (the Export Priced BoQ button lives on the Consolidated tab, next to the client bill preview):
- Total BoQ lines, with how many are in a package.
- Priced, as a percentage of lines, with the awarded and self-priced counts once you have some.
- Packages, with how many are published and, later, how many are awarded.
- At risk: lines that are unpriced and not tendered. The KPI is a button (View N at-risk lines) that opens exactly the lines that need a decision.
The first time you open a cockpit, a How trade packages work banner explains the model in one sentence with a Learn more link into these guides; Got it dismisses it. The four-line explainer card can be reopened at any time with How this works.
Master BoQThe progress strip and the what's-next guide
Two things tell you where the project stands.
The progress strip under the page title has four rungs: Packaging ("Assign every BoQ line to a trade package"), Tendering ("Publish the packages and wait for supplier pricing"), Awarding ("Award each package to lock its pricing in"), and Billed ("Add your markup and export the bill for your client"). The current rung is highlighted and its hint tells you what moves it forward. Until the first line is carved, the strip shows its nothing-yet state.
The same progress also appears as a status badge on the master wherever it is listed: Not started, Packaging, Tendering, Awarding, and Complete. The badge's final state is called Complete; the strip's final rung is called Billed. They are the same state.
The what's-next guide is a What to do next card that shows one suggested step computed from the real state of your project, always with one button: split first (Go to Split), then publish drafts, then wait for or review bids (View packages), award the rest, resolve unbilled lines (Review unbilled lines), price at-risk lines (Review at-risk lines), set a markup (Set markup), export (Go to export), and finally update the project status (Update status). If you know what you are doing, dismiss it with Not now; it never blocks anything.
Closing the loop: the project outcome
Your client is usually off-platform, so VEXORS cannot see whether you won. The master carries a second status for exactly that, separate from tendering progress.
Use Update project status to record one of three outcomes:
- Submitted to client: you have sent the priced BoQ.
- Won: your client awarded you the project.
- Not won: the project did not go ahead.
You can attach a Note (optional); it is private to your company and never reaches a supplier. Every change is kept in the Outcome history, and the declared outcome shows as a badge on the master. When every package is awarded, the cockpit nudges you once: This project looks complete. What happened?
To undo a declaration, use Clear status. The confirmation is explicit about its limit: it clears the status back to undecided and stops the banner, but suppliers who were already notified of the previous outcome are not un-notified.
When you declare Won or Not won, every supplier with an awarded package on the project is notified. A "Not won" declaration does not cancel their award; their award stands unless you take separate action on it. Suppliers never see "Submitted to client", and never see your notes.
What good looks like
- The master is started as a project before the first trade goes out, so every tender's pricing lands on the master from day one.
- The spec book and drawings are in the project library before splitting, so each package carries the right sections and the AI drafter reads the right specification.
- Retention, bonds, the measurement standard, part-bid rules, and each section's bid response format are set on the master before splitting, so packages copy consistent commercial terms.
- The At-risk KPI is at zero and the Commercial Review tab shows no unresolved flags before you promise the client a bill.
- The outcome is recorded when the client decides. Your awarded subcontractors hear it from the platform instead of from silence.
Next steps
- Import your BoQ from a spreadsheetGet the client's workbook into VEXORS without retyping it, and without the importer guessing anything.
- Manage project documents and drawingsLoad the spec book and drawing sets once, then hand each trade only the parts it needs.
- Split into trade packagesCarve the master into per-trade tenders and run them to award.
- Review the commercial positionCheck pricing quality, budget variance, and risk before you commit to a price.
- Price, mark up, and bill your clientSelf-price remaining scope, set markup and preliminaries, and export the client bill.
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