Low-Voltage Engineering Budget and Procurement List Generator

The Problem

For low-voltage and intelligent engineering projects—camera systems, structured cabling, access control, server rooms, and monitoring setups—the hard part of budgeting is not just producing a table. It is missing line items, unclear unit-price provenance, and repeated Excel formatting work. This skill turns a project description into budget and procurement items, retrieves equipment models, material prices, labor rates, and settlement templates from the IMA knowledge base via mcp__ima-mcp, and then builds a structured budget table with sequence, category, specification, unit, unit price, quantity, subtotal, and notes.

How It Works and Core Capabilities

• Knowledge-base first: before answering, it searches with multiple keyword groups, deduplicates and cross-checks results, marks prices with their source, and flags missing items as market reference values or “not found in IMA”.
• Budget table generation: useful for low-voltage items such as cameras, NVRs, switches, APs, access-control devices, network cables, JDG conduit, cable trays, and labor, and also covers renovation, IT, events, and procurement projects.
• Procurement list generation: outputs item name, specification/model, unit, suggested quantity, estimated unit price, and notes, with optional recommended brands or alternatives.
• Output formats: supports Markdown tables and can call scripts/generate_budget.py or scripts/generate_list.py to generate Excel files with currency symbols, alignment, borders, subtotals, and totals.

Boundaries and Caveats

This skill fits best when the project scope, item categories, and quantities are reasonably clear. If IMA MCP is not connected, the knowledge base is unavailable, or the search does not return a price, the output may lack reliable provenance and should be treated as a draft. It asks for missing parameters instead of assuming them, and Excel generation depends on a Python environment with openpyxl.