Importing the Bill of Quantities

A Bill of Quantities (BoQ) can be created by:

Typing the Bill in manually
Copying items from a previous Bill of Quantities, which is called a “Master”.
Importing an entire Bill from an external file, e.g. Excel or provided by the client or QS

We are going to create the Bill of Quantities below by importing these Bill pages from Microsoft Excel.

Access Your New Project Estimate

From the Methvin Portal Home page you three options to launch your new project Estimate:

From your Recently Accessed menu
From the App File Structure (Used to organize Projects)
From the search console

⚠️An explanation of Masters

A "Master" refers to any prior project estimate that serves as a template for transferring bill items, resources, pricing worksheets, intricate details, and definitions into the ongoing estimate. Any estimate can function as the Master for the current project estimate. Normally, an estimator generates a designated Master that acts as the repository of standardized information for subsequent estimates. Effective utilization of Masters can significantly expedite the process of creating and pricing an estimate.

The Bill Importer form

The Bill form in Methvin is designed for importing the Bill. The Bill Importer form contains all the tools required to import and format the Bill. It provides a mapping tool to map the columns from Excel to match the methvin columns.

Importing a BoQ from an Excel spreadsheet

Copying all the Bill of Quantities (BoQ) data in the Excel spreadsheet to the clipboard:

Open the Excel file and select all the data using Ctrl+A or using the global button.
Right Click on the selected range and Copy (Ctrl+C) to copy the Excel data to the clipboard.

Pasting the Bill of Quantities from the clipboard:

⚠️Please insure your browser has access to the clipboardReturn to the Methvin Application. From the Pricing Table tab, access the context menu.
Right click in the Pricing table to access the context menu, select Paste (Ctrl+V)
The import Bill of Quantities Column Selection mapping tool appears. Identify the Item number, Description, Unit and Quantity.
Select the related field from the dropbox to match the excel columns.
Then click the the import button to import the Bill of Quantities in the Pricing table.

Section headings (WBS)

Changing comments to section headings

In a Methvin Bill a hierarchy of headings (WBS) can be created, allowing easier navigation of the Bill by opening and closing sections and generating summary pages in reports.

All non-Bill items imported from an external file, will have its Description highlighted red marking it as a comment. Many of these can be converted to meaningful headings to improve the readability of the Bill.

Set Section Levels:

Select the range of items below the comment line to be converted into a Level heading
Then use the context menu or the Application Menu to indent the selected items.
This converts the comment item into a section header

The first Item of a Bill is often the Project name, if so you would select the entire Bill (Ctrl+A) then unselect the first Item (Hold Ctrl then click the 1st line item). Then indent the selection which would make the Project Name your Section Level 1.