Benchmark
How it works
You send us the quotes you’ve already got. We read them, compare them properly, and tell you what each firm actually priced. Your figures stay yours.
What it does
Compares a package of quotes for one job, item by item, instead of on the total.
What it costs you
Nothing. Uploading, reading and comparing your own documents is free and always will be.
What we take
Rates, and never anything that names you.
What you get back
A comparison per job, and — where three separate companies have priced an item — the range they priced it in.
Why this exists at all
There is no shortage of price books. There is a shortage of price books that have ever seen the kind of work you do.
The published sources are built on repetitive building — estate housing, offices, the same detail a thousand times over. That is exactly what makes them work. It is also what makes them useless the moment somebody asks you for a rate for a hand-made staircase, a stone floor cut to a pattern, or a one-off house where nothing repeats. Look up “joinery” and you will find a figure for a kitchen nobody would put in that building.
The only figures that describe this work are the ones already sitting in the quotes on your desk — yours and everybody else’s. They have never been pooled because nobody has been willing to hand theirs over, and quite right too. This is an attempt at the arrangement that makes it safe to.
What would be shared, and what never would
Every firm, figure and address in the example below is invented. Firms are called A, B and C on purpose: a made-up company name is a real company somewhere.
Nothing of yours has gone anywhere yet, and nothing will without you approving it. This is what the exchange would look like.
Step one
A quotation arrives, and most of it never goes anywhere
Here’s a quotation, near enough as they come. Everything in red identifies somebody, and none of it would ever leave your account. Everything in green is a price for a piece of work, and that is the only part a range could ever be made from.
| Item | Unit | Qty | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineered oak flooring, supply and lay | m² | 184 | £268.00 |
| Site establishment and welfare | item | 1 | £6,400.00 |
Payment 30 days from invoice. Prices held 60 days.
What could ever be shared:
Engineered oak flooring, supply and laym²£268.00
One line of work, its unit, and what it cost. No firm, no job, no address, no quantity.
Step two
One company is not a range
Your row sits on its own. On its own it tells nobody anything — and showing it would tell everybody what you charge. So nothing is shown at all.
Engineered oak flooring, supply and lay£268.00
Engineered oak flooring, supply and lay£241.00
Engineered oak flooring, supply and lay£302.00
One company — nothing can be shown.
Three separate companies — now there is a range.
Three is the floor, and it is not a policy we could quietly drop: with two, anybody who recognises one price has worked out the other.
Step three
Somebody looks it up, and still cannot see you
What a reader gets is the shape of the range — widened, so no edge of it is anybody’s actual price. The three rows behind it stay exactly where they were.
Engineered oak flooring, supply and lay
£230£270£320
low · middle · high, per m²
No name, no job, no date finer than the quarter, and never one firm’s figure on its own.
The same thing, as a list
Would be kept
- What the item is, in the words it was priced under.
- The unit it was priced by — the square metre, the number, the item.
- The rate itself, in full. It is never shown to anyone, and it exists only so a range can be worked out from it.
- The region. A rate in central London and the same rate two hundred miles away are not the same number.
- The quarter it was priced in — and never a finer date than that.
Would never be
- Your name, and your client’s.
- The job, the address, the reference.
- The quantity you priced against.
- Your preliminaries, your terms, your mark-up.
- Anything that would let one figure be traced back to you.
The exact date is the one people are surprised by. A rate stamped to the day, in a trade with a handful of firms in it, is close to a signature. The quarter tells a reader what they actually need — how old the figure is — and tells them nothing else.
You are a code, not a company
When your account is made you are given a contributor code — something like C‑4471. Your name opens your account. Your code carries your rates. The two are kept in separate places and nothing puts them side by side.
It means the people running this can see that C‑4471 has sent in eleven documents, and cannot see what C‑4471 charged for anything. Not by digging, not by accident — there is no screen, no export and no report anywhere that will put a company name next to a figure that company priced.
Why some things will never get a benchmark
This is the part most likely to save you an argument later, so it is worth two minutes. Not every item can honestly be given a range, and the ones that cannot are refused rather than fudged.
Gets a proper range
Work that is the same job wherever it turns up. A padstone. A square metre of plasterboard. Softwood studwork. Three firms pricing it are pricing the same thing, so their figures can sit in one range and mean something.
Gets a rate of thumb
Work whose price follows the size of the job, not the item. Demolition. Scaffolding. Preliminaries. There is no sensible rate per unit, so what we can show is a figure against the size of the building — useful for a first sanity check, and not a rate to price work with. It is labelled that way wherever it appears.
Gets a range for the category, and no more
Bespoke supply. A fireplace. A staircase. Fitted joinery. Two quotes can differ by a factor of thirty and both be right, because they are not the same object. Anything that averaged them would be inventing a number. So you get the spread across the whole category — what this sort of thing costs across a job — and a note saying it is not a rate for an item.
You will meet refusals often, especially early on, and they are the system working rather than failing. A range built on two companies, or on three firms pricing three different objects, is worse than no range at all — it is a number you might put in a tender.
What you get on the first day, with no pool at all
The ranges need a lot of contributors before they are worth much. The rest does not need any, and is the reason to bother now.
Send us the quotes for one package and you get them compared item by item instead of on the total: what each firm priced that the others didn’t, where the quantities disagree, what each one quietly excluded, where the arithmetic does not add up, and the questions worth putting to each of them before you decide.
That is the comparison the totals hide. Three firms within four per cent of each other on the bottom line, and one of them has left out the scaffold.
What comes back
One spreadsheet, per package. Every line each firm priced, set against the others, with what is ours marked as ours. This is a made-up package, drawn to scale.
Firm B is cheapest on the total and has not priced the scaffold. That is the sort of thing this exists to put in front of you.
How a band is built
A range is published only where at least three separate companies have priced the same thing in the same unit. Two is not a range, and one firm pricing the same item forty times is still one company.
What you are shown is always a band, widened to a 5% step — the low rounded down, the high rounded up, the middle to the nearest, and a boundary that would land exactly on a real quoted figure pushed out one step further. So the band always contains the real range and is never anybody’s actual price.
Our own categories are what the figures are grouped under. They are ours, built from what we have read, and they are not a published standard — if an item you price sits under a different name in your own system, the two will not always line up.
Where fewer than three companies have priced something, the screen says how many we hold and what it would take. That is the answer, not a failure to find one.
What it costs you
Nothing, ever, for your own documents. Not a trial that turns into a subscription, and not a free tier with a paywall behind it. You send quotes, you get them compared, and there is no invoice.
The arrangement only works if contributing is free, because the thing being built is the pool and you are the one building it.
Changing your mind
Every document you send has a Remove button next to it for fourteen days. One click takes the document and every rate it held, and the screen tells you how many went. After fourteen days, ask us and we will do it within thirty days.
If a rate of yours ever goes into a range, removing the document takes it back out of the pool as well, and nothing worked out afterwards will include it. There is no version of this where something of yours is stuck because it has already been used.
We will not ask you why, and nothing about your account changes when you do it.