Best Way to Break Out Labor and Material Totals in Estimate Worksheet?
I’m looking for a better workflow for breaking out Labor, Material, and Equipment totals from the Estimate Worksheet.
Currently, I build all of my pricing in a master worksheet like:
• Swimbaits Budget
Then break out into
• Swimbaits Budget Labor
• Swimbaits Budget Materials
The issue is that I price everything together first, then I need to move my costs into my CM software with separate totals for:
• Labor
• Materials
• Equipment
Right now, the only way I’ve found to do this is:
Build the full budget worksheet
Duplicate it for Labor
Duplicate it for Materials
Manually delete labor costs from one
Manually delete material costs from the other
This works, but it’s extremely inefficient. It takes about an hour per project and I have to completely redo it every time there’s a revision.
It also completely breaks when using distributed lump sum costs. Since STACK only truly totals through the Subtotal column, distributed items do not properly allocate across cost types when you start deleting cost columns.
The root issue seems to be that there is no true “Total by Cost Type” column in the Estimate Worksheet. If we had actual totals for: (I have been requesting this since they introduced the Estimate Worksheet)
• Material
• Labor
• Equipment
• Subcontract
• Crew Hours
• Man Hours
This entire problem would go away.
Has anyone found a better way to extract fully burdened totals by cost type per takeoff, including distributed costs and markup, without duplicating and deleting costs in worksheets?
Comments
Good afternoon Chance CBC ,
If you are just looking for total dollar amounts, you can get that when you output the Estimate to the formatted Excel sheet. You can show subtotals on the first page, and you can group those numbers by Cost Type if you like.
My question though is: What are you doing with these numbers?
I take the breakouts and put them into my construction management software and build my proposals using those #s. Its useful when putting together budgets for each division/trade/work scope. I also use it to do job costing after the fact as I can compare line items to totals.
From what I found attempting to use the export to Excel feature is that I spend more time creating formulas and formatting it into the info I need than I do when I make multiple estimates.
The issue really stems from what I mentioned earlier. There is no actual way (that I have been able to find at least) to see totals for each category or assembly with distributed costs included.
For example say I have a project that requires supplying structural steel and engineering on a project and we are also bidding out the install. It doesn't make sense for me to do 2 separate takeoffs for labor and materials because I have my labor pricing set to the same units I order my materials in and my takeoffs give me both numbers at the same time.
We have rental costs for equipment, maybe a crane depending on the project, some fixed costs like engineering, and our O&P individually on materials and labor (They are different %s). I apply 2 different O&P markups, one on the materials, one on labor, and I have the fixed cost for a crane rental on the install bid as its a labor rental cost. The only way I have found to get a usable number out of Stacks estimate is to duplicate the estimate and make one a materials only and make the other a labor only. Otherwise there isn't a single place that will show me the total cost for just material and total cost for just labor. This is because the way they display costs it either wraps all of it together on the worksheet subtotals column or it separate's all of it out on the estimate overview (it pulls the distributed costs out as “Additional Costs”)
I was hoping someone had a workflow that made more sense than the one I have cause its kind of a pain lol.
Hey Chance, at this time, there is not a way to break out the Cost types with their according additional costs. I will share this as a feature request to our team for future consideration.
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