Costings and templates

A costing is one priced version of a job. It owns the Bill of Quantities, the take-off, the cost centers and the markups. A project can carry as many as you need, and they do not interfere with each other.

Creating a costing

With the project selected, choose New → Costing.

Field	What it does
Name	How you tell this version from the others
Select your Price List	Which price list new items are built from
Copy items from a template	Start from a saved template instead of empty
Default WBS for new Costings	Which cost center structure it uses
Make this estimate a template	Makes this costing available to copy from later

The field hint on the name suggests Production Estimate or Sales Estimate, and that is the idea — name the costing after what it is for, not what number it is.

Name costings after their purpose

Tender — Rev A and Tender — Rev B (reduced spec) tell you which is which in six months. Costing 1 and Costing 2 do not, and you will open both to find out.

Choosing a price list

The price list you pick decides which rates are offered when you build items. You can still type a rate by hand or take one from a different supplier, but the default drives most of the work.

Pick the price list that matches the kind of job. If you keep separate lists for renovation rates and new-build rates, choosing the wrong one at this point means correcting rates item by item later.

Why you would have several costings

Situation	How to handle it
Client wants a cheaper option	Duplicate, downgrade the finishes, compare
Tender revision issued	Duplicate, update to the new drawings, keep the original
Two build methods	One framed, one steel, priced side by side
Budget vs contract	Keep the early budget alongside the signed version

Duplicating a costing

Select the costing and choose Duplicate.

The copy carries across:

• the cost center structure
• every BOQ item, with its quantities, rates and markups
• the specification

It does not carry across:

• take-off measurements — those stay with the costing they were made in
• orders, claims, variations and expenses raised against the original

Why take-off does not duplicate

Measurements belong to a costing’s own fields and drawings. Copying them would produce two costings claiming to be measured off the same drawing, with no way to tell which quantity came from where when someone queries a number. Re-point or re-measure in the new costing instead.

Worked example: pricing a cheaper option

The Hendricks extension is priced at Tender — Rev A and the client asks what it would cost with a colorbond roof instead of tiles.

1. Select Tender — Rev A and choose Duplicate.
2. Rename the copy Tender — Rev B (colorbond roof).
3. In the new costing’s BOQ, open the roofing cost center and swap the tile items for the colorbond items from your price list.
4. Compare the two costing totals in the Projects list.

Rev A is untouched. If the client goes back to tiles, you still have the original priced and ready to submit.

Templates

Ticking Make this estimate a template makes a costing available in the Copy items from a template dropdown when creating new costings.

This is how most builders avoid rebuilding the same bill on every job. Set up one costing with your standard cost centers and the items you use on nearly every build — preliminaries, site costs, the standard trades — mark it as a template, and start every new job from it.

A template is a normal costing. It lives under a project like any other, so many builders keep a project called something like _Templates to hold them.

Archived and deleted costings

A costing can be archived or deleted without touching its siblings.

Both are hidden from the costings grid by default. The Show trashed & archived switch above the grid brings them back into view, and the costing itself shows a Costing is archived or Costing is deleted marker so you know what you are looking at.

Two things worth knowing about that switch:

• It remembers. Your choice is kept against your login, so it survives leaving the page and coming back — you do not have to re-tick it every time.
• Showing them is not the same as being able to use them. A trashed or archived costing appears in the grid but still cannot be selected, which is why the grid hides them by default: it then agrees with the costing dropdown, which has always excluded them.

See Archiving and deleting.