Glossary

Terms this product's own domain surfaces, in plain language — not written for a software person.

BOQ (Bill of Quantities)

A structured, itemized list of every piece of work in a project — each line has a quantity, a unit, and a rate, so the whole scope adds up to a defensible price. See what is a BOQ? for the longer version, or how to create one.

Section

A group of related work inside a BOQ — Substructure, Superstructure, Finishes, MEP — that can nest inside other sections.

Position

A single priced line item inside a BOQ section: a description, a quantity, a unit, and a rate. Quantity × rate gives its total.

Assembly

A reusable bundle of labor, material, and equipment resources that rolls up to a rate — so an estimator doesn't re-derive the same concrete rate from scratch on every project.

Markup

The percentages applied on top of direct cost — overhead, profit, contingency, and tax — to turn a priced BOQ into a bid price. See how markups are applied.

Baseline

A saved snapshot of a project schedule at a point in time, used afterward to measure whether activities have slipped, held, or pulled in — the snapshot itself never changes once saved. See how to save a baseline.

RFI (Request for Information)

A formal question about the project — a design ambiguity, a missing detail — logged with threaded responses instead of an email thread nobody can find later. See creating and answering an RFI.

Variation (change order)

A change to the agreed scope, cost, or schedule, tracked through an approval lifecycle (draft, submitted, under review, approved or rejected) instead of a verbal agreement. See submitting and approving a variation.

NCR (Non-Conformance Report)

A record of work, material, or process that didn't meet the required standard. Closing one requires a stated root cause and corrective action — not just marking it done. See logging and closing an NCR.

Four-eyes verification

A rule that the person who checks or approves a piece of work can't be the same person who did it. Buildiante enforces this on the server, not just in the interface — see where and why.

Ball-in-court

A construction-industry shorthand for whose turn it is to act on an open item — who owes the next response. Buildiante uses this as a literal field on every RFI — Client, Consultant, Designer, Internal, or Other — separate from the RFI's own open/answered/closed status. See creating and answering an RFI.

Three-way match

Comparing what was ordered, what was actually received, and what was invoiced, line by line, before approving payment — catching a mismatch instead of discovering it after the fact. See how three-way matching works.

Punch list

A list of deficiencies to fix before a project (or a phase of it) is considered complete. See how to manage punch list items.

Takeoff (quantity takeoff)

Measuring quantities — areas, lengths, counts — directly off a drawing or a 3D model, instead of calculating them by hand from a printed plan. See measuring a PDF drawing or taking off a BIM model.

Multi-tenant / data isolation

Buildiante runs one shared application for every customer (a “tenant”), but every record is scoped to your organization at the database level using Postgres row-level security — enforced independently of the application code, as a second layer, not just a query filter that a bug could bypass. This is the same answer given on the pricing page's FAQ, stated plainly rather than glossed over.