Jobs, estimates and bill-of-quantities lines

How the Construction pack follows a job from pricing an estimate built on bill-of-quantities lines, through award and site work, to close-out.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Construction businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.

Ask a contractor where every job stands and the answer usually comes from three places: a tender register in a spreadsheet, estimates in a folder of workbooks, and the contracts manager's diary. Each one is accurate for the person who keeps it. None of them tells the owner, on a Monday morning, which bids are still out, which jobs were awarded but not yet signed, and which are stuck waiting for a final inspection.

The Construction & contracting pack in Achekam's Industry CRM puts those answers in one place. It follows a job from the first pricing through award, site work and the defects period to close-out, using the words a builder uses.

This article walks through how the pack is organised: the records it keeps, how an estimate is built, the stages a job moves through, and what the pack deliberately leaves to other tools.

Three kinds of record

The pack keeps three records that match how contracting work is actually run:

• Jobs are the spine. Each job carries the customer, the stage it has reached and the work that goes with that stage.
• Estimates are built from bill-of-quantities lines, so a priced estimate reads the way the client's quantity surveyor reads a priced bill.
• Change orders are priced line by line, so a variation is costed with the same discipline as the original estimate.

Keeping change orders as their own record matters. A variation agreed on site is a separate commercial decision, and treating it as one is the first defence against arguments at the final account, as change orders priced, approved and signed explains.

Estimates from bill-of-quantities lines

Much building work in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya is priced against a bill of quantities, whether the client's quantity surveyor prepared it or the contractor measured it from drawings. Building the estimate from those lines keeps the contractor's price in the same shape as the document it answers.

The pack never supplies rates. No starter catalogue item in any industry pack carries a price, so every rate on an estimate is the contractor's own. That is deliberate: material prices, labour costs and margins differ from one region and one firm to the next, and a figure suggested by software would be a guess. The firm's own cost records are the better guide, and AccountingTools explains how job costing accumulates the materials, labour and overhead costs of each job so they can be traced to it.

The stages a job moves through

A job moves through these stages:

Seeing every job on that line answers the Monday-morning question at a glance: how much work is being priced, how much is won but not signed, and how many finished jobs still have money or snags outstanding.

Conditions that hold a job at a stage

In the Industry CRM, a record cannot move into some stages until set conditions are met, such as a customer being named, an amount being set or a signature being done. The checks can also look for a workflow stage or a particular kind of task being completed.

For a contractor, this is what stops a job being moved forward on someone's say-so. Where a stage carries a condition, a job cannot drift into it while what the condition asks for is still missing.

From enquiry to job, with the work laid out

When an enquiry is converted, the Industry CRM creates the customer and the pack's main record at the same time and starts that record's workflow. Nobody has to type the client's details twice or remember to open a job file.

The workflow then creates its tasks stage by stage, so the site-establishment work appears when the job reaches that point rather than cluttering the list from the first day. Tasks can have subtasks up to three levels deep, which suits construction: a stage, the trade or area within it, and the individual items under that.

The words the pack uses

Each industry pack sets the words the screens use, as well as its record types, pipelines, workflows, document requests, documents to sign, reminders, starter catalogue, ledger accounts and home-page counts. For a contractor, that means the screens talk about jobs, estimates and change orders rather than generic deals and opportunities. Staff who have never used a CRM are more likely to recognise their own work in it, and that is often the difference between a system people use and one they work around.

What the pack leaves outside

Knowing the limits helps you decide what still needs its own tool. The Construction pack:

• does not calculate progress claims or retention releases; those amounts are the contractor's own figures;
• is not a construction programme, so it does not replace your scheduling software;
• is not a site diary, so daily site records still belong where you keep them now;
• checks nothing with the municipality, so building-plan approvals and inspections are tracked by your team.

The pack is the commercial and administrative backbone of each job. It sits alongside the programme and the site diary, not in place of them.

Getting started

Before switching the pack on, list your open jobs and decide which stage each one has reached, using the table above. That one exercise tends to surface the awarded job with no signed contract and the finished job whose retention nobody has claimed. The later stages of a job are covered in snags, defects period and final account, and the payroll controls every contractor needs in stopping ghost workers and bank detail fraud.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.