The Basics

1. What is Vermeulens Cost Intelligence?
It’s an interactive, systems-based cost platform built on fifty years of bid-reconciled project data. You use it to set budgets, test scenarios, and defend numbers, system by system, instead of arguing over a single $/SF total.

2. Who is it for?
People who set budgets and answer for them: school districts, campus capital planners, healthcare systems, owner’s reps, and municipalities. Architects use it too, as partners at the table when the owner and design team set targets together.

3. What project types does it cover?
K-12 education, healthcare, labs and research, parks and recreation, student housing and life, and performing arts. All of them use the same six-system structure (structure, enclosure, interiors, mechanical, electrical, site), so any project can be compared with any other.

Trust and Method

4. How is this different from a cost index or an AI benchmark?
An index tells you what things generally cost. We tell you what your last bid actually cost, argued line by line against the contractor’s own number until both sides agreed. That’s reconciliation, not a model’s best guess.

5. What does “reconciled” actually mean?
Two independent estimators price the same documents. Every difference is tracked by division, priced, and resolved on screen, so each one is either explained or fixed. The result is a defensible range, not two totals forced to match. Only data that has been through that process goes into the database.

6. Why do you organize costs by system instead of by unit price?
Knowing what concrete and steel cost doesn’t set a budget. Knowing what a system costs does. Systems are also where design decisions live, so you can see which choice moves the number before it becomes a change order.

7. How current is the data?
Every project in the library can be escalated to today’s dollars with one click. That puts a 2019 bid and a 2026 bid on the same footing, indexed to your time and place.

Getting Started

8. ✱How fast can we get started?
Bring us your closeout files. You get a working dashboard in thirty days and your first live tool inside sixty, built alongside your team, not delivered over the wall.

9. What do you need from us?
Closeout files from your completed projects. On a first call we’ll confirm exactly which documents are useful, so you aren’t hunting for things we don’t need.

Data and Privacy

10. ✱Whose data is this, and who can see it?
Yours. Your dashboard is built from your own closed projects, and sharing with peers is your choice. If you opt in, you can compare against your county, your state, and the national view. Peer data opens up to you in return, and it stays protected.

Cost and fit

11. What does it cost?
[Needs your decision.] The brief positions this as a loss leader, with a free calculator as the hook and a pilot offer as the conversion. 

12. Does this replace Vermeulens estimating and reconciliation?

No, they feed each other. Estimating produces line-item detail, reconciliation proves which lines were right and why, and those reconciled lines become the intelligence that makes your next estimate more defensible.