Building a price list

New item creates an entry. Import brings many in at once from a spreadsheet.

Shared price lists are read-only

Lists, items and products supplied with SmarteBuild can be seen and used but not changed. Their rows do not respond to double-click, the edit and delete controls are hidden on them, and Import, New item and Structure only work on your own lists. You can still record your own price against a shared item — see Keeping rates current.

Adding an item

Pick the cost centre in the left pane first, then New item. The item is created into that cost centre; if you have not picked one, the form asks for it. An item needs a name, a unit and a cost centre — everything else can wait.

Editing

Two ways, depending on how much you are changing.

In the grid. Double-click a cell on one of your own rows to edit it where it is — code, name, description, unit, price, GST and cost type all work this way. Enter saves, Escape cancels, Tab moves along the row. Prices are ex GST; if the figure you have is inc GST, type it and choose Divide by 1 + GST in the editor.

In the drawer. Click a row and use the pencil icon for the full form — factor, productivity, size, approval, note and everything above in one place. The drawer also shows the item’s price history, its products and every list it is filed in.

Select several of your own rows with Ctrl or Shift and a bar appears along the bottom: Delete, set GST, and Move to a cost centre. Dragging the selected rows onto a cost centre in the left pane does the same move.

The fields

Field	What it does
Code	Your item code — sorts the list
Item Name	Short name shown in pickers
Description	Full wording, used on purchase orders
Unit and Price	The rate and what it is per, ex GST
GST	Effective (GST applies) or Non-GST
Cost Type	What kind of cost it is — labour, material, subcontract, plant
Factor	A multiplier applied to the rate
Productivity	Output per unit of time, for labour-driven rates
Note	Where the rate came from, when it was checked

Cost Type

Separating labour, material, subcontract and plant is what lets you answer questions like “how much of this job is labour?” It also helps when costs move unevenly — material inflation and labour rates rarely move together.

Fill it in as you build the list. Adding it retrospectively across 800 entries is a job nobody does.

Factor

A multiplier applied to the rate.

Useful where a base rate needs consistent adjustment — a regional loading, or a supplier discount off list. Change the factor and everything using it moves, without editing individual rates.

Where a rate is simply what it is, leave the factor alone. A factor nobody remembers setting is a confusing thing to inherit.

Importing from Excel

Switch to the list you are importing into, then Import. The dialog has three steps:

1. Download the template — a spreadsheet built from this list’s cost centres and your units. It has one sheet, PriceList, with seven columns: Item Name, Description, Code, Unit, Price, GST and Cost Centre. Fill it in, one item per row, starting at row 2. Delete the e.g. example row or leave it — the import skips it either way.
2. Upload your file.
3. Map the columns — pick the worksheet, then confirm which of its columns holds each field. The template arrives already mapped; any other spreadsheet works too, you just point each field at the right column.

Then Import. The dialog reports how many items were created, how many rows were skipped, and why.

The Unit, GST and Cost Centre columns in the template have dropdowns built from your own data, so you are picking from your real cost centres and units rather than typing them.

Only Item Name and Cost Centre are required

Everything else can be left as (not mapped). An item does need a cost centre, though — a row without one is skipped.

Cost centres must already exist. Unlike the BOQ import, this one will not create them: add them with Structure first. A row whose cost centre is not in the selected list is skipped, and the result names the ones it could not find. The cost centre can be written as its name or its code.

What the result tells you

A count of what was created, plus anything that needed attention: rows skipped for an unrecognised cost centre or a price that was not a number, and items that came in with the default unit or as GST Effective because those cells were not recognised. Prices written as $1,250.00 import fine.

Most builders already have rates in a spreadsheet, so this is usually how a list starts. Before importing:

1. Standardise the descriptions. This is the moment to write them properly — they end up on purchase orders.
2. Set the units consistently. m2, sqm and m² become three different units otherwise.
3. Fill in Cost Type. Much easier in a spreadsheet than one entry at a time.
4. Remove anything you have not used in two years.
5. Import ten rows first and check they land correctly before running the rest.

The import is the best moment to improve the descriptions

You are already in a spreadsheet with all of them in front of you. Find-and-replace across 400 descriptions takes minutes; editing them one at a time in the application afterwards takes a week and never happens.

Exporting

Export produces an Excel workbook of the list you are looking at, in the order the screen shows it. It has two sheets:

• PriceList — every item with its cost centre, unit, price, GST and cost type, plus whether the price is one you set yourself (and the list price behind it), who owns the item, and how many products it has.
• Products — every supplier product on those items: supplier, SKU, manufacturer, price, category and whether it is superseded.

Prices are the ones that apply to you, so where you have recorded your own price on a SmarteBuild item the export shows yours. The first seven columns of the PriceList sheet are the import template’s columns in the same order, so you can edit an export and import it straight back into another list.

It is the quickest way to hand rates to someone for review, or to build one list from another.

Building it without stopping work

Nobody has a spare month. The way this actually gets built:

Start with your next job. As you price it, add each item to the price list rather than typing it into the costing. The job takes slightly longer; the list starts existing.

Do the same on the next two jobs. By the third, most of what you price regularly is in there, and jobs are getting faster rather than slower.

Then fill the gaps — the trades you have not happened to price yet.

Three jobs, and you have a working list that was built from real work rather than from a blank sheet.

What not to put in

Rates you will never reuse. A one-off allowance for something unique to one job belongs on that costing, typed, not in the list.

A price list of 2,000 entries where 300 are used is harder to work with than a list of 300. Keep it to what recurs.

Notes

Record where a rate came from and when it was checked:

From Barwon Concrete schedule, Feb 2026. Includes pump for pours over 15m³.

Six months later that answers whether the rate is current and what it covers. See Keeping rates current.