You may wonder how our quantity surveyors stay sane when they are measuring and pricing plans all day… We can tell you from personal experience that doing a full take off (measure) of a job can literally have you time hopping. You start in the morning and suddenly its 5pm!!!!
So, because of the nature of the job, its super important to us to have a back stop of sanity so we can make sure we haven’t missed anything… because that is a QS’s worst nightmare, and it should be yours too if you are pricing your own work!
So how do we mitigate the risks? We peer check.
For example, in house here at Red QS, every single job that we do has a built-in allowance of time for another QS to peer check the job. Why? Because another set of eyes when you have been staring at something for hours is INVALUABLE. If you are working with ANY qs, you need to make sure they are doing this, it’s simply best practice.
Because we believe in the practice, we also offer it to you guys….. and it comes in a few shapes and forms.
High level peer check.
A ‘High Level Peer Check’ basically means we look over a job at a high level, we want to see the detailed costings, the quote letter to the client, and the plans so we can se if there are any glaringly obvious holes. We will be picking on how you have calculated your labour, how you have costed Preliminary and General, how you have used PC or Provisional sums, and how you have tagged the quote.
We will be looking to see that all the documents match each other and that they make sense and checking off areas that look unreasonably high or low. We form this into a written report and provide recommendations on how you might want to approach it next time. We also highlight where the numbers look off and provide recommendations of where we believe they should be.
Deep dive peer check.
The other version of a peer check is what we call ‘A Deep Dive’. You can probably gather just from the name that it is a much more detailed review! This is where we pull out the scale ruler and sanity check some of your measures, we dive into your sub-contractor quotes and see if there are any glaring holes that have been tagged. We double check any of your totals that don’t seem right, and we make sure you have the coverage you need for all materials and labour.
Basically, we check everything we possibly can based on the data we are given. It takes a bit of time to do, but just last week we found an extra $25k of materials missed off a merchant quote going through this process!
Another hugely useful part of this type of peer check, is the application of the contract documents…. Lots of our guys find the formal tender documentation a bit full on. Its not so bad for us as we have seen it all before! So, if you have received a big pile of documents and you have been asked to provide the pricing information in a particular way then by all means, let us check it for you if you feel at all unsure.