BOQ Intelligence
Stop re-typing BOQ data. Start pricing from day one.
- Extracts every line item
- Preserves BOQ structure
- Pricing-team ready output
The Problem
Does this sound familiar?
“Our estimator spent days re-typing BOQ items from a scanned PDF. We found errors after submission.”
“Our estimation team spends hours reformatting BOQ data before they can start pricing.”
The tender arrives as a scanned PDF or locked document. Before a single rate is entered, someone manually re-types hundreds of line items. Errors creep in before the pricing even starts.
“We've submitted bids with missing BOQ items because the tender had multiple schedules.”
A 300-page tender with BOQ split across three volumes and two appendices. The pricing team worked from the main schedule. Two sub-schedules were overlooked. The omission was found after the bid went in.
“Our estimators are too valuable to spend their time on data entry.”
Senior quantity surveyors and estimators are the scarcest resource on a bid team. Every hour spent re-typing BOQ data from a PDF is an hour not spent on competitive rate analysis or strategy.
BOQ Intelligence eliminates the data preparation stage entirely. It doesn't matter whether you're a CFO measuring bid preparation costs, an estimation head managing team bandwidth, a project director reviewing bid accuracy, or the quantity surveyor who has been re-typing BOQ data for the last decade. Your pricing team gets a clean, structured, page-referenced dataset — and they start where the real work begins.
How It Works
Step by step
Four steps from raw tender document to a structured, pricing-ready BOQ dataset.
Step 01
Upload in any format — no pre-processing required
Upload the tender as a PDF, scanned document, multi-sheet Excel workbook, or ZIP file containing multiple volumes. Keendex accepts the document exactly as the portal delivers it — no conversion, no OCR, no reformatting before upload. Multi-volume tenders are processed as a single unit.
Step 02
AI identifies every BOQ section across the full document
The engine scans the entire document — not just the section labelled “Bill of Quantities.” It detects BOQ tables, rate schedules, sub-schedules, item appendices, and provisional sum sections wherever they appear — including annexures, separate volumes, and addenda.
Step 03
Structured extraction of every line item
Item descriptions, quantities, units of measurement, schedule names, sub-headings, rate columns, and amount columns are extracted and structured. The hierarchy of the BOQ is preserved — chapter breaks, sub-heads, and item groupings maintained exactly as in the original. Every line item is tagged with its source page number.
Step 04
Download pricing-team ready — no re-work
Export the structured BOQ as PDF, Word, or Excel. Your pricing team receives a clean dataset with all line items, quantities, units, and schedule structure intact — ready for rate filling without a single manual entry.
In Practice
What a real day looks like
Real scenario
A quantity surveying team receives a large NHAI highway project tender on a Monday morning. The BOQ runs across four separate schedules — civil works, drainage, structures, and road furniture — spread across the main document and two appendices. Submission is in an extended period. The estimation team has three other live bids running simultaneously.
Historically, data preparation for a BOQ of this size takes hours re-typing line items from a scanned PDF into their pricing template, cross-checking quantities, and building the schedule structure from scratch.
They run the tender through Keendex BOQ Intelligence. By the time the morning stand-up meeting ends — a short session after upload — all four schedules are extracted. 1,847 line items, structured with descriptions, quantities, units. The Excel export is in the shared folder before their first coffee break.
The team spends the saved time on rate analysis, subcontractor benchmarking, and competitive strategy. Their final rate is sharper. Their bid is more competitive. They win the project.
What You'll Stop Doing
What you'll stop doing
These are the activities BOQ Intelligence makes unnecessary from the first tender you run through it.
- Spending hours re-typing BOQ line items from scanned PDFs into pricing templates before estimation even begins.
- Missing BOQ schedules buried in appendices or separate document volumes that aren't in the main section.
- Discovering transcription errors in quantities or units after the bid has been submitted.
- Assigning senior estimators to data entry work because there is no other way to get it done in time.
- Losing competitive edge because the team spent their bandwidth on preparation instead of strategy.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions
Five questions that address the most common points of hesitation before a team commits to using BOQ Intelligence on a live tender.
What happens if the BOQ spans multiple documents or volumes?
Upload all volumes as a single ZIP file. The engine processes all volumes together and extracts BOQ schedules across the full set — maintaining the correct schedule hierarchy.
Does it preserve the BOQ structure — sub-heads, chapters, item groupings?
Yes. The hierarchy of the original document is preserved in the extracted output — chapter breaks, sub-headings, provisional sum sections, and item groupings are maintained exactly as they appear in the tender.
Can the extracted BOQ be imported directly into our estimation software?
The Excel export is structured with item descriptions, quantities, units, and schedule names in separate columns — compatible with standard estimation templates. Direct integration depends on the estimation software's import format.
What if the tender BOQ is in Excel format rather than PDF?
Keendex processes multi-sheet Excel workbooks directly. The engine reads all sheets, identifies BOQ data, and structures the output — handling cases where data is spread across multiple tabs.
Can we re-run BOQ extraction on an updated version of the tender?
Yes. Upload the revised tender and re-run. The History module stores all versions, and you can compare extraction outputs to identify what changed between the original document and any addendum.
Ready to see BOQ Intelligence on your live tender?
Book a personalised demo — we run it on a real document from your sector.