Generating a Pricing Document for Preliminaries Content

Overview

NBS Chorus provides a financial summary export for specifications written using the Australia ‘SpecPack’, ‘SpeedSpec’ and ‘SureSpec’ content sets, and the UK ‘CAWS Work Sections' content set.

These content sets may be used on basic construction projects, where the work is of a simple nature. On such projects the cost involved in the preparation of detailed bills of quantities may not be justified, or the form of contract used for the project may not support the use of bills of quantities. Under such circumstances the contract sum is likely to established based upon the specification and drawings, however a breakdown of the overall contract sum value may still be required.

The financial summary feature allows the contract sum for these basic construction projects to be broken down into smaller amounts. These can then be used as a basis for assessing amounts due as interim payments as work progresses, or as a reference point for negotiating variations to the contract. 

You can read more about pricing specifications and drawings for small works in the blog post by Roland Finch, Technical Author at NBS.

The financial summary export is not currently available for other content sets, including preliminary content sets. However you may wish to extract a schedule of clause codes and titles for your preliminary content as the basis for creating a financial summary for prelims.

The steps below identify a workaround you can use to achieve this:

Note: The screen images below are for both PC (1st image) & Mac (2nd image).  

1. Publish the preliminaries to Microsoft Word from NBS Chorus.

2. Open the published preliminaries file in Microsoft Word from your downloads folder.

3. By default, the table of contents will show only the section headings and not the clauses. To change this, select the ‘References’ menu and click on the ‘Table of Contents’ toolbar button.

4. Select ‘Custom Table of Contents…’ at the bottom of the menu.

5. In the ‘Table of Contents’ dialog use the following settings (as shown in the screen images below).

1. To include page numbers leave the ‘Show page numbers’ checkbox ticked, to omit page numbers untick this checkbox.
2. If the ‘Show page numbers’ checkbox has been ticked, ensure the 'Right align page numbers' checkbox is also ticked. 
3. Untick the ‘Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers’ / ‘Use links instead of page numbers’ checkbox.
4. Change the ‘Formats’ option to Classic.
5. Change the ‘Show Levels’ field to 4 levels to include the main section headings, sub-sections headings together with the clause details.

        e. Click ‘OK’.

        f. When prompted whether to replace the table of contents click ‘Yes’ / ‘OK’.

6. Select / highlight the entire table of contents, a simple way to do this is as follows:

1. Scroll to the top of the table of contents.
2. Click on the ‘Contents’ title at the top of the table of contents, the table control will be displayed above the title.

        c. Click on the 3 vertical dots at the left of the table control.

        d. The entire table of contents should now be highlighted.

7. Copy the table of contents using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C (Win) / CMD + C (Mac).

8. Open Microsoft Excel and create a new blank workbook, ensure cell A1 is selected.

9. Paste the table of contents using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + V (Win) / CMD + V (Mac).

10. Adjust the column widths and/ or alignments for the pasted data as desired and remove any unwanted information.

11. Insert your preferred cash column heading into an adjacent column and adjust the column width and numbering format etc as desired.

12. Insert a Sum formula, e.g. =SUM(D1:D587), at the bottom of the list.