Organising items
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A bill of two hundred items is only useful if you can find your way around it. These are the tools that keep it navigable.
Cost codes
Section titled “Cost codes”Edit Cost Codes sets the code on an item — which cost center it belongs to. Change Cost Codes Heading re-labels a heading in the tree.
Moving an item to a different cost center is the most common structural edit you will make, and it is worth doing as soon as you notice, because everything downstream groups by it. An item coded to the wrong trade turns up on the wrong purchase order.
Sorting
Section titled “Sorting”Change Sorting sets the order items appear in within their cost center, and WBS tree sorting controls the order of the tree itself.
Ordering items in build sequence rather than alphabetically makes a bill much easier to check. Excavate, form, reinforce, pour, finish reads like the job happening; a gap in that sequence is a missing item, and you can see it.
Organise Items
Section titled “Organise Items”Organise Items and Reorganize selected items restructure the bill in bulk — moving groups of items between cost centers, or resequencing them.
Use it after importing from a template that does not quite match the job, or after a structure change. It is much faster than editing items one at a time, and it is the tool to reach for when a bill has grown untidy rather than living with it.
Orphan items
Section titled “Orphan items”Show Orphan Items finds items that are not under a valid cost center — usually the result of a center being deleted or renamed while items still pointed at it.
Orphans still carry quantities and rates, and they can still count toward the total, but they will not appear where you expect and will not group onto orders. Run this after any significant restructure. Anything it finds should be re-coded to a real center.
Filtering the view
Section titled “Filtering the view”Several settings narrow what you are looking at:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Only Included Items | Hides switched-off items |
| Only Selected WBS | Shows one cost center at a time |
| Hide Empty Nodes | Suppresses cost centers with nothing in them |
| Show Archived | Brings archived material back into view |
Hide Empty Nodes is what makes a full standard structure usable on a small job. Import your fifteen-trade template onto a bathroom renovation and eleven of the trades are empty; hide them and the bill reads as though it was built for the job.
Only Selected WBS is the one to use when you are working a trade at a time.
Pricing the whole of 800 Services without the other fourteen trades on screen is
faster and much less error-prone.
Show Buttons
Section titled “Show Buttons”Show Buttons controls which action buttons appear on each row. Turning off the ones you never use gives more width to the columns you actually read — worth doing on a laptop.
Choosing columns
Section titled “Choosing columns”The columns icon at the right-hand end of the header row switches columns on and off:
| Column | Starts |
|---|---|
| Product | On |
| Supplier | On |
| PS/PC | On |
| Progress | On |
| Status | On |
| Ordered | Off |
| Actual Cost | Off |
Switch off what you do not use and the rest of the columns get the width. An estimator who prices by rate rather than by product usually turns Product and Supplier off; a job in construction usually wants Ordered and Actual Cost on — see Over budget.
Your choice is remembered against your login, so it follows you to another computer, and it is yours alone — it changes nothing for anyone else on the job. Column widths are remembered the same way: drag the edge of any column header.
The Flag field marks an item for your own attention. There is no fixed meaning to it, so give it one and be consistent — most people use it for “come back to this”.
Flag anything you have typed a quantity for that should really be measured, any rate you are unsure of, and anything waiting on a price. Then work the flags down before you submit.
A practical routine for a large bill
Section titled “A practical routine for a large bill”- Build the structure first, in build sequence.
- Import from your template, then Hide Empty Nodes.
- Work one trade at a time with Only Selected WBS.
- Flag anything provisional as you go.
- Before submitting: clear the flags, run Show Orphan Items, and check the trade subtotals add to the job total.
Step five takes two minutes and catches most of what goes wrong in a bill.