Every number shows where it came from.
A price you can’t check is just an opinion. The bank, the insurer, your client — they all have to believe it, and none of them can ask the builder how he got there. The document has to answer that by itself.
Here is a real one, taken apart. It prices a full renovation of an 80 m² apartment in Amsterdam.
Groepslijn
Work is grouped by trade, and each group totals on its own. The chapter numbers follow the STABU structure, so anyone who works with bestekken can navigate it on sight.
Elementenlijn
Inside the group, one line per item of work — how much, at what rate, and what it comes to. Labour sits apart from materials, so you can see which half of the price is men on site and which half is stuff being delivered.
Calculatielijnen
Under the element sit the parts it is built from. They carry their own quantities — the plasterboard is 200 m² against the wall’s 50, because it is both sides, twice over. No separate price: the element line is their sum.
Inbegrepen en niet inbegrepen
On another line — the tiling — what the price covers is stated on the line itself, not in small print at the back. The tiles are not in it. The adhesive is.
Metingen
Carried further down the same line: where the quantity came from, room by room. Badkamer 27,9 plus toilet 9,5 makes the 37,4 m² above — check it against your own plan.
Aankoop
On the doors, again elsewhere in the document: where a material is bought in, the assumed price is on the page. Choose something dearer or cheaper and you can see exactly which number moves.
Stelpost
Some things cannot be priced exactly yet — here the skips. Those carry a budget figure, marked as one, and settle against what is actually spent. The line underneath says plainly what it does not cover.
Optie en bevroren
An optie is priced but deliberately left out of the total, so the headline number never includes work you didn’t ask for. A bevroren line carries no price at all — considered, and not calculated. Both stay visible in grey, so you can see what was thought about.
Eindtotaal
At the end the same split runs across the whole job: labour, materials and subcontractors apart, and both BTW rates shown.
An estimate, not a quote
A kostenraming prices the work as specified. It is not a builder’s binding offer, stelposten can move, and the exclusions are real. All of it is written down in the first chapter, before any number appears — which is rather the point.
Your estimate will look like this
Same structure, same rules, your job instead of this one. If a line is ever unclear, this page explains it — or ring me.
the full estimate, 11 pages →
Renovation of an 80 m² apartment in Amsterdam. In Dutch. Names and company details are placeholders.