Daily work
Jobs and estimates
Categories, line items, fees and contingency, and how an estimate rolls up.
In short
An estimate is a tree of categories with line items underneath. Parents add up their children automatically, so you only ever type a number in one place.
An estimate is a tree of categories, and categories hold line items. A category can hold other categories, so you can go as coarse or as fine as the job needs.
Categories
Add categories on a job's Budget tab. Each one has a name and a type, and a category with children rolls its children up automatically. You never add the same money twice: a parent shows the total of everything beneath it, plus its own estimate if you gave it one.
That own-estimate is worth knowing about. A parent category can carry an amount of its own alongside its children, which is the usual way to hold slush for work you have not broken out yet. When the category is collapsed you see one number, the total. When it is expanded you see both.
Categories roll up to their parent automatically.
- 1What you expect the work to cost. Type it on the category, or build it up from line items.
- 2Real charges you have filed against this category, updating as you categorize.
- 3Every category rolls up into this total. You never add the column yourself.
Note
Charges attach to categories with no children. If you add a child to a category that already has spending on it, that spending stays where it is, but new charges will want a child instead. Plan the depth you want before you start categorizing.
Line items
A line item is quantity, unit and unit price. Three fields, and the total is computed.
For anything more involved than that, open the calculator from the Add line item row under a category. It handles the arithmetic you would otherwise do on paper:
- Labor, as a person times hours times a rate. People you save are reused across jobs.
- Material, as quantity times a unit price.
- Lump sum, for a number you already know.
- Fee and contingency, as a percentage of whichever rows you select.
Each row you build becomes its own line item, so the estimate stays readable and the client sees real detail rather than one opaque total.
Fees and contingency
Fee and contingency are percentages, not amounts, and they follow the work. Set one up as a percentage of the categories you choose, and it recalculates whenever those categories change. Add scope, and the fee moves with it.
Two things to know:
- A fee never charges on another fee unless you explicitly select it. You do not earn fee
on your fee by accident.
- A fee set to a percentage of everything means its own siblings, not the whole job. A fee
nested inside a group marks up that group.
If you need a fee to depart from its own formula on one job, you can override it from the Project Costing tab without touching the formula itself.
Keeping the table readable
Drag a category by its handle to reorder or renest it. Drag a column edge to resize it, and click a column header to sort. Widths are remembered per table on your device.
Collapse a group to see its total instead of its parts. The collapsed state is remembered per job, so a long estimate stays at whatever level of detail you left it.