The Origin of Bill of Quantities

Bill of Quantities is synonymous with Quantity Surveyors. The profession was said to have emerged in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although the firm of Henry Cooper and Sons of Reading was established as early as 1785. Prior to the first recorded usage of the term "Quantity Surveyor" in 1859, the terms "measurer", "custom surveyor" or "surveyor" were used.(ASAQS, 2006)

BOQ emerged in the 19^th century after the Industrial revolution in Europe. In those early days the Quantity Surveyors acted for the master tradesmen, measuring the work after completion for use in making payment to workers and frequently submitted as partisan Final Accounts to the building owner to claim for payment. Later on it was the practice of the building owners to call for tenders before any work was undertaken. A procedure was then developed to invite several master builders to submit tenders for the total price of the project rather than a collection of prices from master tradesmen or what is known today as sub-contractors. (ASAQS, 2006).

For the purpose of submitting the bid or tender, each builder then has to come out with accurate estimates of the project cost or tender. It was done by measuring and quantifying the quantities of all materials and labour necessary to complete the work, i.e. preparing a bill BOQ for the project. As each builder had to prepare his own BOQ for each project, they came to realise that they were duplicating a lot of effort by each measuring the same quantities from the architect's drawings. They realised that it is more economical for them as a group to employ one surveyor to measure the work and prepare the BOQ for them.

The builders will then price the BOQ and submit their tenders on the same basis. They would share the cost of the Quantity Surveyor (or the successful builder will pay the surveyor) and include the payment in their bids. On the part of the building owners themselves, since they ended up paying for the Quantity Surveyor's fees, it finally dawned on them that they might as well employ him directly and get some cost advice from him as well. (ASAQS, 2006; Myles, 2006, CIQS 2006).

Apart from some minor changes in term of method of measurement, content and format of presentation, BOQ is still a document detailing description and quantities of all the construction work of a project. It may now may come in elemental, trade, work section or operational form. With the advent of ICT, the process of preparing s has evolved from the tedious manual and time consuming processes to semi-automated or fully automated processes involving the use of computers and sophisticated specialised software. But the whole process is still involving the toiling over many hundred drawings

in doing the time consuming “taking off”, many hours of meetings and discussion with the client and other consultants and drafting, checking, editing and printing the 300 – 500 pages document.

Source: Paper presented at International Conference on Construction Industry 2006