Cost catalog

Every estimating organisation prices from somewhere: commercial databases, published national reference bases, or an internal catalogue distilled from its own project history. A catalogue entry typically pairs a work description and unit with a rate or a resource build-up, and mature catalogues carry regional adjustment factors and dated price levels so a rate can be moved between locations and years.

In several jurisdictions, including much of the CIS, the cost catalogue is not merely a convenience but part of the normative base: state-issued rates and norms that public-sector estimates must be assembled from, with compliance checked during expert review.

Catalogues fail by decaying. Prices age, work methods change, and a rate observed on one kind of project gets silently reused on another. Because the catalogue sits underneath every estimate the organisation produces, an error in it does not stay in one project — it propagates into all of them, which is why the unglamorous work of maintaining, dating and back-testing the catalogue matters more than any individual estimate.