Guides
Pricing, contracts & compliance.
Practical guidance on the things that actually decide whether a tender makes money.
Pricing
Preliminaries & general (P&G) explained: what it covers, the typical percentage of a South African contract, what inflates it, and how it's handled on extensions of time.
A plain-language guide to the structure of a Bill of Quantities — preliminaries, measured work, provisional and PC sums, dayworks and contingencies — and the pricing traps to watch for.
From direct cost to submitted price: building up materials, labour, plant and subcontractors, then adding P&G, overhead, profit, contingency and VAT — with a note on pricing risk.
Where to start
If you are pricing your first tender, read them in this order. Start with reading a tender bill of quantities, so you know what each section of the bill is asking for and where the traps are: provisional sums, prime cost items, and items that look measured but carry risk. Then read how to price a construction tender, which builds a rate from materials, labour and plant and adds the preliminaries, overhead and profit on top. The guide to a fair P&G goes deeper on the preliminaries, which is where inexperienced tenderers most often under-price.
If you are deciding which work to chase, read CIDB grading explained. Your grade sets the size of public-sector contract you can tender for, and it rises with your track record and financial capacity, so the work you win now shapes the work you can bid for later.
If you have been handed a contract you have not worked under before, read NEC3 vs JBCC. The two forms divide risk and administration very differently, and habits from one can lose money on the other.
How these guides are written
They are written for South African practice: South African forms of contract, CIDB rules, SANS standards and local pricing conventions. Where a guide gives a typical percentage or range, it says where that comes from and when it does not apply. The guides explain how things usually work; they do not replace the documents on your project. When the tender data, the contract or the engineer’s specification says something different, follow the document.
For answers to specific contract questions, the Contract Assistant covers NEC3, JBCC, GCC 2015 and FIDIC clause by clause, and the practitioner notes go into the failures that cost contractors most.
Refreshed rates, and what they mean for a bill you are pricing, go out monthly in The Rate Sheet.