A bill of quantities (BOQ) is the priced list of items that make up a contract. Each line carries a reference, a description, a unit, a quantity and a rate, and the lines sum to the contract value. It is the commercial backbone: progress claims, variations and remeasures are all argued line by line against it. But a BOQ line is not how work is executed. A line reading “unitised curtain wall, 4,200 m²” is fabricated and installed as elevations, levels and rooms. Breaking each line into zones — named pieces of work, each with its own quantity — is what lets a contractor track fabrication, delivery and installation against the quantity he will eventually claim, and notice the moment the zones add up to more than the line.
For contractors who fabricate what they install, the zone is the unit everything else hangs on — drawings, take-off, stages, delivery notes, installation and inspection — so Muthari OS makes the BOQ line the parent of its zones.
BOQ items carry reference, description, quantity and rate, and can be imported from Excel. Zones under a line are free-labelled, so they map to whatever the job is actually built as — an elevation, a level, a room.
When a line’s zones add up to more than the BOQ quantity, the zone breakdown freezes and a variation is raised for approval, with the excess quantity on record. The variation is caught when the zones are defined, not after the work has been installed for free.
Installation is recorded per zone as additive daily entries and can never exceed the zone quantity; corrections are new entries, never edits. Claims derive their previous quantities from the last invoice, so the same quantity cannot be claimed twice.