It's the workhorse of heavy-civil and infrastructure contracting, where final quantities aren't known precisely at bid time, so payment tracks the units actually built against agreed unit prices. Agencies scrutinize unit-price bids for “unbalancing,” where prices are skewed across items, and may reject bids that are materially unbalanced.
Each unit price is meant to carry its share of labor, equipment, materials, overhead, and profit, so the contract can absorb quantity overruns and underruns without renegotiation. Front-loading — loading high prices onto early-paid items like mobilization to improve cash flow — is the most scrutinized form of unbalancing, and agencies will reject a bid when the imbalance could raise the cost to the owner or distort the award. Accurate quantities are the foundation of a sound unit-price bid. Nonlinear's Quantity Takeoff extracts measurable quantities from the drawings and specs and populates the unit-price schedule, giving estimators a faster, more reliable basis for their numbers.
