Moving Your NBS Office Master to Avoice
What carries over when a practice moves its NBS Chorus office master to Avoice, what gets better, and what to tidy up before the switch.
Why moving feels risky
For many technical directors, the hardest part of changing specification software isn't the software. It is the office master. Years of decisions sit inside it: the prelims you rewrote after a dispute, the rainscreen build-up you finally got right, the phrases you banned. Moving feels like it puts all of that at risk.
It doesn't have to. Your master is your practice's knowledge, not the software's. Done properly, a move is a chance to keep everything that works, drop what doesn't, and end up with a master that is enforced on every spec instead of copied in at the start.
Take stock before you move
Don't migrate a master you haven't looked at in a while. Spend a few hours sorting it into three piles first. Most practices find a third of their master hasn't been used in years.
Moving a smaller, cleaner master is faster and gives you a better result than moving everything.
A quick way to find what is actually used: pull your last ten issued specifications and note which master sections appear in them. Whatever never appears is a candidate to drop.
What carries over
The parts of a master that hold real value all move across. What changes is how they are stored: as a practice library that the spec agent drafts from, rather than as template text a writer copies.
| From your NBS master | Where it goes in Avoice |
|---|---|
| Office master clauses and sections | Practice library, versioned, ready to insert into any project |
| Preliminaries templates | Saved as full section templates, one per contract form |
| Wording conventions | House style rules applied to every clause the agent drafts |
| CAWS or Uniclass structure | Kept as is; Avoice writes to CAWS and Uniclass 2015 |
| Clause numbering | Numbering rules enforced on every section |
| Preferred products | Preferred products, linked to manufacturer data |
The simplest way in is to give Avoice what you already issue. Gather your office master and add a handful of recent issued project specs, and Avoice learns your preferred systems, products, phrasing and level of detail from them. The issued specs matter as much as the master: they show how your teams actually write, not just how the template says they should.
What changes once it's in Avoice
In most specification tools, the master is where a spec starts. In Avoice, it shapes every clause as the spec is written.
- Drafted from the drawings, in your voice. Point the spec agent at the project drawings and reports, and it drafts sections using your master's systems, products and wording.
- Rules hold under deadline. House rules such as "shall not must" or "no proprietary names in Systems clauses" are applied to every draft, whoever is writing.
- Corrections stick. Fix a clause once and the correction carries into future drafts.
- Changes in the world reach the spec. When a standard is superseded or a product is discontinued, live projects that cite it are flagged.
- Checked against the drawings. Each clause is cross-referenced against drawings and schedules before issue.
Run the first project in parallel
Don't switch everything at once. Pick one live project at Stage 3 or early Stage 4, draft its specification from the migrated master in Avoice, and compare it with what your current process would have produced.
One pilot project shows whether the migrated master holds up before any other team depends on it.
During the pilot, track three things: how long the first full draft took, how many clauses the technical director had to correct, and how many of those corrections were house-style issues the rules should have caught. Turn every repeated correction into a rule before the next project starts.
Time the switch to your Chorus renewal date. If you still have months left on a contract, talk to us about how to bridge the gap so you aren't paying twice.
Before you switch off the old system
- Every issued specification is archived as issued, with its revision history, outside the old software.
- The pilot project's spec has been reviewed and signed off by the technical director.
- Preliminaries exist for every contract form the practice uses.
- House rules cover the corrections made during the pilot.
- The master has a named owner in Avoice and a monthly review slot in the diary.
- Project teams know which clauses are locked and how to propose a change.
Moving a master is mostly housekeeping you should have done anyway. The difference afterwards is that the master stops being a template people forget to start from and becomes the standard every spec is written to.