A free NRM2 bill of quantities template for Excel

Jamie Rowe

Published on 23 October 2026

In short: this is a free Excel template for an NRM2 bill of quantities. It's set out by NRM element, laid out the same way as the bill Kestrel™ exports, and it does the arithmetic for you: each line totals itself, and the subtotals look after themselves. Before we built Kestrel, I put my bills together by hand in Excel, so I've also been straight about where a spreadsheet stops being enough.

Download the template (Excel, 31KB)

Free, no email required.

What's in it

Two tabs:

BOQ. The bill itself: item code, description, quantity, unit, rate and total. Preliminaries come first, then all 48 elements in NRM groups 0 to 8, each with its own band, room for four lines and a subtotal. It's blank, ready for your quantities and rates.
How to use. The notes in this post, inside the file, so they travel with it.

It's arranged elementally, by NRM group and then element, because that's how Kestrel exports. NRM2 allows a work section arrangement too, and the measurement rules are the same either way. There's more on the structure in what an NRM2 bill of quantities is.

Filling it in

Overtype the title at the top of the BOQ tab with your project name.
Give each line an item code, a description, a quantity, a unit and a rate.
To add a line, copy a whole line and insert it anywhere between an element's grey band and its subtotal.
Delete the elements the job doesn't need, from the grey band down to its subtotal. Keep the orange group bands and the group subtotals, so each group still adds up.

It also does a few things a blank spreadsheet won't:

A line only totals once it has a quantity and a rate, so a half-priced bill shows what's left to price instead of rows of £0.00.
Lines you add inside an element are picked up by its subtotal.
A negative quantity deducts, for openings and the like.
It prints one page wide, with the column headings repeated on every page.

Where a spreadsheet runs out

A good template gets the arithmetic right every time. It can't do anything about the numbers you give it, and that's where my time used to go.

Every quantity is typed. It's measured on the drawing, with a scale rule or a PDF editor, and then keyed in. A misread length, or a run missed altogether, looks exactly like a correct one, and the formulas carry it faithfully all the way to the grand total.

The trail stops at the bill. A line carries a description and a quantity, and nothing about where the quantity came from. When a client asks where a figure came from, you're opening the PDF and finding it again.

Zones and phases mean cutting the bill up by hand. If a job has to be priced in zones, this gives you one bill to split. The eight-zone fit-out in my first post came out of one takeoff, and doing that split across a workbook is exactly where mistakes creep in.

None of that is a case against Excel. A priced bill nearly always ends up there, and so does this template. It's a case against typing in a quantity that has already been measured.

Where Kestrel fits

We built Kestrel™ to take the typing out. You measure lengths, areas and counts on the PDF, each measurement stays on the drawing it came from, and the export is a bill laid out like this one, with the quantities already in and a zone summary when the job is split. Alongside it comes the marked-up PDF, with every measurement numbered, so a client can trace a line back to the drawing without asking. It runs on Windows, with a 14-day free trial, and no card is needed to start it. If you start on the template and move across later, the bill your client gets looks the same.