Scalable product · Web
ComPres
Quantity take-off and budgeting for civil construction.
Client
ComPres
Engineering and construction · Water and sanitation civil works
The challenge
What it was like before
Budgeting a civil works project is long, painstaking work. You have to calculate how much each task takes (metres of pipe, concrete, machine hours, labour days), break each one down into materials, equipment and labour to price it, and only then add overheads, contingencies, profit and taxes to reach the number you present in a tender. All of that lived in spreadsheets: every budget was an enormous file full of chained formulas. In practice that meant entering prices by hand one at a time, updating the dollar cell by cell every time the exchange rate moved, and having no reliable history, because saving overwrote the previous version. Formulas broke on their own and data went missing, with the very real risk of presenting a wrong number in a tender.
- Prices were entered by hand, one by one. The same material appeared in dozens of different places in the same file.
- A large share of the prices are in dollars, so every move in the exchange rate meant updating cell by cell.
- Saving overwrote the previous version. To avoid losing it, copies piled up with names like presupuesto_obra_v3_final_final.xlsx.
- Unit price analyses were copied and pasted between projects, carrying errors from one spreadsheet to the next.
- Changing a single quantity meant checking by hand that totals, taxes and the final coefficient had all been updated.
- The spreadsheet lived on one person's computer, with no orderly way for several people to work on it at once.
The solution
What we built
We built a single system, reachable from the browser, where the company's whole budgeting process lives. It is not an improved spreadsheet: it is a tool built for this job. There is a central price catalogue (materials, equipment, labour, suppliers and unit price analyses) that is loaded once and reused across every project, so if a price changes it changes in one place. The take-off is organised by section and line item, with the unit price analysis for each task built in. The dollar handles itself: the system takes the official Banco Nación exchange rate and fuel prices from public sources, and converts everything. Each version of the budget is frozen exactly as it was, including that day's exchange rate, and two versions can be compared to see precisely what changed and by how much. The final price recalculates instantly on any change: overheads, contingencies, profit and taxes are applied on top of the take-off. There is also autosave, teamwork with roles, exports to the formats the company has to submit, and a dashboard tracking projects, budgets and the exchange rate. Each company's information is kept separate and protected, and there is nothing to install.
What we delivered
- Central price catalogue
- Take-off by section and line item
- Unit price analysis built in
- Automatic Banco Nación exchange rate
- Frozen, comparable versions
- Final price calculation
- Teamwork with roles
- Exports and an indicators dashboard
On screen
The product in use
Outcome
What changed
The repetitive tasks went from hours to minutes: updating prices, converting the dollar, recalculating totals. There is a single source of truth instead of ten copies of the same file floating around. The history is real: any budget can be reconstructed exactly as it was presented, and the reason it changed from one version to the next can be explained precisely.
And the knowledge stays with the company rather than in one person's spreadsheet: several people work on the same information, with clear permissions. The team prepares more budgets, with the same headcount and with more confidence in the number it submits.
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