My Favourite CostX® Feature: Report Writer

Each month, we will ask a Product Specialist what their favorite feature of CostX is and how it can be used. This month, we are speaking to our Malaysian Product Specialist Andy Ang.

When I recall studying Quantity Surveying, the subject that was most time-consuming was measurement. The test for measurement, which only required taking off all ground-floor beams for a bungalow, would take up to four hours. At that time, I always thought that if there was software that could help us do the quantity takeoff with a couple of clicks of a button, that would save a lot of my time.

After graduating and starting to practice as a QS in the construction industry, I found out that construction takeoffs are still very time-consuming, but with some formulas using Excel, you can expedite the process. The new challenge then shifted from takeoff to preparing Bills of Quantities. The content of the Bills of Quantities we could just copy and paste from an old file, but when it comes to printing out the Bills of Quantities, it takes from a few hours to a whole day just to amend the pages’ alignment, item code, headers, footers, and page break.

Hence, my favorite RIB CostX feature would be the standard report writer. We just need to key in our information in the Bill of Quantities, and RIB CostX has the ability to generate the report nicely and neatly automatically. It’s very easy to use- just generate a report with the click of a button. It saves the time where you used to be keying in the item code page by page and filtering I & O manually, and you are not required to identify which line to input the page break in either. Sometimes, when there was a minor change in description, which affected the page break, we needed to redo all the page breaks in Excel. This will never happen in RIB CostX; the software auto-generates the page breaks and aligns the content. Other than that, when using Excel, if the number is large, some figures might be missing or hidden when we print it out. RIB CostX always wraps text, so no figures will be hiding when we print out the Bills of Quantities.

Most of our users might think that RIB CostX saves time in taking off, but as a complete solution, RIB CostX is able to assist Quantity Surveyors in reducing the time to prepare complete Bills of Quantities at the moment drawings are received from designers. From electronic takeoff, live linked quantities, and live linked rate to print out the report, for me, the report writer is the feature that Quantity Surveyors cannot live without.

If you want to learn more about the powerful features of our BIM takeoff software, contact your local RIB team. If you are not a CostX user and want to see what the platform is all about, get a free demo today!