The latest version of the WinQS bill production software from ACE Solutions CC is bound to score a bulls eye amongst quantity surveyors. This must be one of the smartest upgrades of the WinQS package yet. Your Webmaster was lucky enough to get his hands on a pre-release of WinQS32 Version 5 beta and put it through it's paces over the weekend.
I pestered Mike Applewhite of ACE Solutions for the new version of WinQS32 until he finally relented and e-mailed the upgrade files to me last week Wednesday. I had to do a "hard-install" by unzipping some files straight into their directories. That done, I fired up the new version and immediately clicked on Measurement Groups the heart of the WinQS system, to see what changes he had made under the hood.
Let me first try and explain MG's or "Measurement Groups" to the non-WinQS users. The MG section of WinQS allows you to create items in the MG section (similar to preparing a collection list) and then link a cascading series of items to it from a Bill of Estimates. A typical MG screen in the WinQS32 Bill of Estimates module looks like this:.
The item "Girth of external walls" is highlighted in the above illustration. The item is then linked to several items within the estimate as illustrated below:
My collection of (linked) items from the Bill of Estimates (BoE) consisted of a strip footing, one brick wall, beamfilling, the external and internal finishes, skirting and cornice.
Let's now follow one of the items through to the BoE. We'll use the strip footing as an example.
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