Demolition (Abbruch)
You price demolition by eye and pay for it by the tonne. Between the two stands the weighbridge at the tip gate — and it is the one that is right.
How it is billed
Demolition goes by the cubic metre of enclosed volume or the square metre of area, selective strip-out by the piece and the metre, haulage and disposal by the tonne, skips by the piece and by standing days, plant by the day or the hour. The tonne here is a billing unit, not an estimate — the program knows it just as it knows the square metre, so the item on the invoice looks like the weighbridge ticket. Protecting neighbouring property and damping down are items of their own, not a given. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions structure by structure, name every measurement your own way, and the total goes into the quote as a finished item with the breakdown — you can see where the figure came from.
What disappears on paper
What disappears is the gap between the estimate and the weighbridge. The wall that looked like twenty tonnes weighs thirty — and those ten tonnes are yours if the contract holds a lump sum with no clause about billing by weight. Segregation disappears: mixed waste costs several times more at the tip than sorted waste, and sorting is paid hours nobody counted. Skip standing time disappears, the plant delivery, and the days you wait for collection. And what you find inside disappears — old insulation material can halt the whole site until it is tested.
Work it out yourself
Take the last demolition. Add up the tonnes from the weighbridge tickets and compare them with what you put in the quote. Then count how many loads went as mixed waste and how many as sorted, and multiply the difference in rates by the tonnes. Add the skip standing days. Multiply by the number of demolitions in a year — that is the amount you threw out with the rubble.
Five minutes a day
The weighbridge ticket for every load entered the same day — otherwise the job ends with a pile of slips and nobody knows which belongs to what. A photo before you start: the state of the neighbouring buildings, the fences and the surfaces the plant will drive over. That photo is worth exactly what the neighbour’s cracked wall costs, the one you will be blamed for. In the evening: hours, skips, tonnes.
What the program watches for you
Disposal records and photos sit on the job, together with hours and costs — not in a folder in the van. When you work for a construction company, the program sets the reverse charge under §13b and watches the §48b certificate, without which your client must withhold fifteen per cent. It watches the instalment invoices, because you pay for skips and the tip as you go while the customer pays at the end. Additional work — and with demolition it is the rule, because nobody knows what is inside until they start — is kept as a variation with the date it was announced. That date weighs more here than anywhere else.
At the end of the year
Disposal is the biggest cost item of the year, right after the people. Tonnes, skips, plant hire, hours, kilometres — all recorded against the jobs. The annual accounts and the VAT returns read finished figures.
What matters is entering things regularly — the weighbridge ticket logged the same day is the only thing that defends your pricing.
