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Estimating is a skill that can make or break a career or
company. Understanding the estimating and bidding
processes is essential for your business to remain
profitable.
This is newsletter #30 in the series. If you have
missed prior newsletters, and are enjoying the series,
we encourage you to purchase the complete Electrical Estimating Program.
Click on the coupon at the bottom of this page.
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The Estimating Process - Pricing and Labor |
After developing the bill-of-material, you need to transfer the items and their quantities to the Price/Labor Worksheet for pricing and labor.
If you're using estimating software, the material quantities, pricing and labor are automatically com-pleted by the computer. This is fast and convenient but still requires you to be accurate while enter-ing counts. A best practice may be to use a spreadsheet for very small jobs of service work that has a simple bill of material and labor calculation. Save the estimating software for larger projects where the quantity of counts and variety of materials allow the computer to really save you some time.
Pricing
The act of pricing consists of looking up the cost for each material item and applying it to the Price/Labor Worksheet. To save time, add the cost for each of the material items to your spreadsheet so it can automatically perform the cost extensions. If there isn't a cost associated with a particular material item, draw a line through the cost field or highlight it so that you know later you did not omit it.
Author's Comment: Pay special attention to the unit of measure that the cost reflects, such as E for each, C for 100, and M for 1,000.
Labor
Labor costs consists of looking up the labor unit associated with each material item and entering those values on the Price/Labor Worksheet. To save time, add the labor units for each of the material items to your spreadsheet so that the labor-hour extensions are performed automatically.
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The above content is extracted from Mike Holt's Electrical Estimating Program.
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