Opinions of cost and bond estimates

1. Join early access.

   Aggrado Engineering is in early access. From the Engineering page, select Join early access, or on Get started choose I'm a civil engineer, then Join early access, and leave your email.

2. Aggrado sets up the firm.

   Aggrado sets up your firm with you as it opens, and you become its owner. Once it's made, invite your engineers and designers from Company › Users and roles.

The company opens with Engineering alone. The bar shows your Projects and Unit prices, with Public bid prices under View. Inside a project the menu bar reads Estimate, Documents and Construction. Every new estimate is an opinion of cost: name it and select New opinion. It reads Preparing until it's Issued. A contractor using Bid can make an owner's estimate too, by checking Owner's estimate beside New estimate.

When you add someone on Users, an engineering firm's roles are its own: Engineer of record prepares and issues opinions and files bond estimates; Designer takes off and prices them but can't issue; Reviewer reads and changes nothing; and Office admin runs the firm's setup. Issuing an opinion and sharing it with the client both need the approval Issue opinions of cost and share them, which an owner can give any role on the Roles tab of Company › Users and roles.

In construction, the Resident project representative role keeps the record on site, and recommending payment, answering RFIs, issuing orders and accepting payrolls each take their own approval, all held by the Engineer of record. See Construction administration for engineering firms.

Unit prices on the bar (or Settings › Unit price book inside a project) opens the firm's unit price book: the items you price over and over, each showing what it went for on private owners' jobs and on public ones, side by side, with the difference between them, since the two are often far apart.

1. Start the book.

   Select Start with the common site items for clearing, grading, storm pipe, erosion control, base, paving, curb, walk and water, or add your own with Add to the book. Each can carry a Typed price to fall back on.

2. Load your past jobs' bid results.

   Under Where the prices come from, enter the job under Load a past job's bid results, say whether it was A private owner's job or A public owner's job, select Next: its tabulation, and paste or read the tabulation. The Private column is priced from your private openings; the Public column, from your public openings with the agencies' lettings. By default each opening or letting gives the average of its three lowest bidders, and the price is the median of those over the last 24 months; Each letting gives can make it the low bid or the median of all bids instead. Lettings needed is 3 unless you change it. An item with fewer still shows a price, marked low confidence, but it doesn't count for Private, else public.

3. Choose what prices each item.

   Under Priced from, Private, else public uses your private results where there are enough and the public ones otherwise; Private only, Public only or Typed price use just that.

4. Adjust.

   Adjustment on every item moves the whole book by a percentage (a market that's moved, a remote site); Item adjustment moves one item on top of it. Prices from the last sets how many months of results count, and Nearby counties which counties' lettings are preferred where two of them have the item.

View › Public bid prices on the projects list (it's under Settings inside a project) shows what's in the public bid library and loads more of NCDOT's lettings into it. It's one library for everyone on Aggrado, so a letting someone has already loaded is there for you too, and your unit price book reads it without anything to pull.

1. Choose the lettings.

   Choose the Central letting or a division (Division 10 for Charlotte) and how far back, then select List its lettings.

2. Load them.

   Select Load the … not loaded yet, or Load beside one letting. Each contract's bids are read from NCDOT's bid tabulations, low bid by item. A letting whose tabulations aren't posted yet, or are scanned images, has nothing to read, and says so.

1. Start the estimate.

   Open a project, go to View › Estimate, and select Start the owner's estimate.

2. The pay items.

   On Estimate › Pay items, load the items from the funder's form or your plans, or read a Civil 3D or OpenRoads quantity report or a Bluebeam markups list. Item numbers and units are checked against NCDOT's or SCDOT's pay item list when you use one.

3. Price each item.

   On Estimate › Unit prices, select Price every item from the book, or type an item's unit price yourself; From the book shows what the book would price it at, and Use takes it. On Takeoff links, quantities follow the surfaces, pipe networks and CAD layers you brought in with File › Import and measured on Takeoff and Volumes.

Before there are quantities, Estimate › Parametric opinion (early, from drivers) prices an early Class 5 opinion from a few drivers of the project.

Estimate › Check says what would make the opinion wrong. It doesn't ask for a contractor's crews, quotes, markup or bond, since every unit price is yours. It flags an item without a unit price or a quantity, and a unit price more than 35% from your book's and outside the middle half of the lettings. A book price that rests on little (too few lettings, other quantities, old or scattered prices) is noted, not warned about. A price you set yourself is yours to keep: the check only asks you to look.

Documents › Opinion of cost holds what the opinion carries around the priced items.

1. Who it's for.

   Under Who it's for, choose Owner's budget, To compare bids against or Funding agency. Each says what it carries: one to compare bids against carries the bid form's items and nothing else, and one for a funding agency takes prices no more than 60 days old.

2. Estimate class.

   Choose the Estimate class (AACE 98R-18) from how complete the design is. The range starts in the middle of the class; change Range, low end and Range, high end if this project calls for it.

3. Escalation and contingency.

   Set Escalation to mid-construction as one rate, or split it so diesel, asphalt, concrete, pipe and aggregate each escalate with their own published price index, and set the Contingency.

4. Basis of estimate.

   Under Basis of estimate, write what it rests on under Scope, Method, References, Assumptions, Exclusions and Risks. It prints with the opinion.

Download preliminary PDF prints it on your letterhead, marked preliminary until it's issued. Word gives the same opinion as a Word document, to add your own wording or the seal before it goes out.

Documents › Bid form makes the bid form for the bid documents from the opinion's pay items, in two copies. For the bidders: Bid form PDF or Bid form in Excel, with blanks for each unit price and amount, the total, the addenda received and the bidder's signature. Engineer's copy: the same form with your unit prices filled in, marked as not for the bid documents, as PDF or Excel.

1. Issue.

   Under Issue and share, select Issue the opinion, then Issue opinion of cost. An issued opinion can't be changed; a new revision can.

2. Share with the client.

   Under Share with the client, enter their email address and select Send the link, or leave it empty and select Make a link to copy it yourself. The client opens it with no account and reads the opinion, its basis and the PDF.

1. Start one.

   On Documents › Bond estimate, name the filing, choose the jurisdiction's form (Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, Concord's roadway or SCM form, Raleigh, Greenville County, or your own prices), and select New bond estimate.

2. Add the improvements.

   Add each improvement from the form's list at its price, or draw quantities from the estimate's pay items. The total is checked against North Carolina's 125% of the cost to complete.

3. File it.

   Download PDF prints it. To file on the jurisdiction's own Excel form, select Get the blank form where the jurisdiction publishes one, then Fill in their form and choose it: the quantities go on the form's own rows and the project and firm beside its labels. An older .xls form needs saving as .xlsx first.

4. Reductions.

   For a reduction or an extension, select Copy as the next filing and bring the completed quantities up to date. Once the guarantee is posted, Post a guarantee under Posted guarantees keeps it: its reductions line by line, renewals, fees, release and when it expires.

5. The erosion control surety.

   Under Erosion control surety, per disturbed acre, choose whose rate (Raleigh's, Chapel Hill's, one your firm keeps, or Another rate…, which Keep this rate for the firm saves for next time) and the disturbed area, from a limits-of-disturbance boundary or typed, then Save the surety. It's outside the 125%, so it's never added to the bond estimate; it prints on its own at the end of the bond estimate's PDF.

On Estimate › Scenarios, name an option and say what changes: a different Finished grade (a raised, lowered or balanced copy made first with the site balancer or a building pad on Volumes), Pay item quantities as they would be, or Haul distances. Each is priced beside the base estimate, with what the quantity did and what the price did, and never written into it.

After the opening, on Construction › Bid tabulation, select Add bid results and paste or read the tabulation, marked as a private or a public owner's job. The opinion is compared with the low bid, overall and item by item, your record against FHWA's ±10% of the low bid builds up across projects, and the tabulation joins the prices your unit price book reads. The certified tabulation prints as PDF or Excel, and Draft the award letter drafts the recommendation of award for you to edit.

These items in your past bid results sets each pay item beside what it went for at your other projects' openings, matched by what it says. Public bid prices for these items does the same with agencies' public lettings in the project's state.

On Estimate › Revisions, select Start revision … when the design moves on: it copies the pay items, quantities and their links, unit prices, scenarios and the opinion's settings and basis, and leaves the last revision as it was. A snapshot is kept each time an opinion is issued, and Take a snapshot keeps one whenever you like. Under Compare, pick any two to see what the quantities moved and what the prices moved.

The menu bar's Help › Help and support has the rest of the guides, and Help › Ask Aggrado answers questions about your projects.