Changing Prices - Making It Easy!

Prices for labor, materials, and equipment are changing regularly. You can spend literally hours changing your prices when your costs change. There is a solution. In each of the items you can identify the type of labor that's performing the work, like "Carpenter". You also can enter the time it takes to do something, like 1/4 hour for each linear foot of 2X4 Exterior Wall Framing. This will be automatically multiplied by the hourly rate for the labor, let's say $10/hour, for a resulting cost of $2.50 per linear foot. Does this make sense so far? A carpenter you pay $10 per hour averages 15 minutes for each linear foot of 2X4 Exterior Wall Framing, resulting in a cost of $2.50.

So, let's say you give the carpenter a raise to $11 per hour. You could go through and change all the items after you calculated the new cost. This would be the hard way, and could take hours to do, depending on the number of items you have. The easy way is to change the rate for the "Carpenter" in the labor file and click the Update button to start the update. Within a minute, all your costs that use carpenter labor will be updated. How much time will that save you? How many errors in calculations might that save you?

That's not all. The same process applies to equipment and materials. Equipment is identical to labor, except it's for the equipment you use on your jobs. Materials are slightly different. You need to identify the primary source of the cost of the material in an item. For example, in the 2X4 Exterior Wall mentioned above, the primary source of cost is probably the lumber. So, we would identify the Material Group for this item as lumber. You can set up as many material groups as you need to do your job effectively. If lumber prices are going up 5%, you just have to change the "Lumber" material group to 105% and click the Update button and all items that have the lumber material group will have their costs updated by 5%. If it's a decreased price, you'd enter 95% to decrease the price by 5%. How many hours will this save you?

So, we've saved you lots of time. Depending on the features you've taken advantage of, you may have saved two weeks or more a year... a 54 week year. What will you do with the extra time? Besides the time, there is the reduction of errors. That's a big thing also. How much is that going to save you in a year?