Estimating, labour, margins and taxes

The Estimate page calculates a bid from the reviewed takeoff: material and hours from the bill of materials, cabling lengths, free lines, labour rate, margin and taxes.

Access and input data

Path: project → Estimate. A viewer may inspect; an editor or project administrator changes settings and exports. Only confirmed and manual detections on active sheets feed the BOM. Candidates, ignored items and disabled sheets are excluded, even if they appear in a review export.

Build the estimate

1. Enter the labour rate and margin. All hours—recipes, runs and free lines—are multiplied by this rate. Margin applies to the material-plus-labour subtotal before tax.
2. Review Cable and pipe pricing. For every type/gauge combination, enter material price per foot and labour hours per foot. A grey value is the default; entering a value overrides it, and clearing the field returns to the default.
3. Check the BOM. Class chips return to the corresponding recipe. A blank cost remains blank and contributes zero to the total; correct it in the catalog or recipe.
4. Add free lines for permits, rentals, mobilization, material or labour not shown on the plan. Each accepts description, quantity, unit, unit cost and unit hours. A line without a description is not retained.
5. Select a tax group, Organization default or No tax.
6. Verify BOM material, run material, free-line material, hours, labour cost, subtotal, margin, taxes and grand total.

Taxes: live default and snapshot

Owners and administrators define groups under Administration → Tax groups. The initial Québec group contains 5% GST and 9.975% QST, both applied to the base amount. A group can contain several ordered lines, including a compound tax whose base includes earlier taxes.

While the estimate remains on Organization default, it follows the organization's current default group. Explicitly selecting a group stores a snapshot of its name, rates and order in the project. A later administrative change therefore does not alter that estimate. No tax stores an empty snapshot. To adopt new rates, select the group again.

Recalculation, review and export

The page recalculates after each save and every load. Confirming a detection, changing a recipe or price, recalibrating a sheet, or changing cabling spare affects the next calculation; there is no global recalculate button.

AI check opens the AI assistant to flag missing prices or unusual quantities. It is optional assistance, not approval. Then export the Estimate PDF or Excel workbook from Exports.

Limits and recovery

A blank field is not a market price, and a default value is not a supplier quote. Always validate prices, hours, taxes and rounding. If a total looks wrong, check in order: active sheets, statuses, recipes, catalog tiers, multipliers/spare, hours per foot, free lines, rate, margin and tax snapshot. Exports are immutable: after a correction, generate a new file.