Revit®

Revit, as one of the leading BIM authoring platforms, covers virtually every feature you could ever need for 5D BIM Cost Management. In fact, the sheer number of commands available can feel overwhelming at first. The good news: for 5D Cost Management specifically, you only need to become familiar with a handful of them. For those curious to explore further, Revit rewards deeper exploration — but it’s not a requirement to get started.

Three areas of the interface are particularly relevant to QS work: the Navigation Bar, the Project Browser, and Properties. These give you the means to move through the model, locate elements, and inspect their data — the foundation for everything that follows.

5D BIM Cost Management

To carry out 5D BIM Cost Management, you’ll also need to install the QSKing QTO plugin, which introduces three additional interfaces you’ll work with regularly:

The Run QTO command works much like asking an assistant QS to prepare takeoff quantities for you — it extracts quantities directly from the model and populates them onto the QTO Schedule.

The QTO Schedule then lists out all the extracted line items from the BIM model. From here, you can trace or highlight any element and review its type properties with a single click — keeping quantities directly connected to the model they came from. The Schedule also provides a Design-to-Cost total and can be printed out in Excel format for further use.

The Workbook is where billing happens. This is where you set up your Elemental Cost Plan, organizing line items under their respective elements. From there, you can call out specific line items from the QTO Schedule and live-link them directly into your cost plan. Once complete, everything can be printed out in Excel format for further use — ready for reporting, submission, or client review.

Each of these three interfaces — Run QTO, QTO Schedule, and Workbook — will be covered in far greater detail in their own dedicated chapters, walking through the specific commands, settings, and workflows involved.

For now, the most important step is simply this: download Revit and install the QSKing QTO plugin. Reading about the software only gets you so far — the real understanding comes from opening it up and working through it yourself.

Read the book, feel the software.