Cost buildup
A unit rate is built from materials, labour, plant and uplifts. Every number must point back to a source.
Open a bill line and use the buildup. Materials need a quantity per unit of finished work and a wastage percent. Plant needs hire duration per unit.
For labour, use Add labour. You do not work out an hours-per-unit figure. Pick the crew, say what you pay them and how fast they work, and the application does the rest.
On a line that came from an assembly, most of that is already filled in. If your cost database has the crew and its trade rates, there is nothing to type — read the proposal and apply it.
Whichever route you take, the bill gets one labour row per trade. It never shows a single mystery lump.
Overheads and profit can sit on the line, the section, or the whole project. The nearest level wins.
You can save a buildup back to the tenant library for reuse. That does not change estimates already priced.
The AI may propose a buildup when none exists. You accept, edit or reject it. It never writes a priced rate on its own.
Fields
- What you pay
- The all-in cost of the whole crew for one gang-hour or gang-day. Labour only — if the figure includes plant or materials, price those separately.
- Example: 720 on a day-priced gang means £720 buys you that whole crew for a day.
- Output
- How much work the crew gets through in an hour or a day, measured the way the task is measured. It is applied to net installed work, so wastage never adds crew time.
- Example: 3 m² per gang-hour on a 3.5 m wall is 1.166667 gang-hours, or 0.145833 gang-days, for every metre of wall.
- Gang-units per unit
- The older, direct route: how many hours or days of the whole gang one unit of finished work takes. Add labour derives this for you.
- Example: 0.5 on a m² wall item means half a gang-hour (or half a gang-day) per square metre, depending on the gang’s unit.
- Wastage
- Extra material allowed, as a percent of the net quantity.
- Example: 5 on bricks means five percent extra bricks, not five pounds.
Examples
Nothing to type
A cavity wall line from a takeoff assembly. Your cost database has a 2:1 bricklaying gang and its trade rates. Add labour shows the crew, the output and the cost per metre. You press Apply labour. Two rows appear: bricklayer hours and labourer hours, each at its own rate.
One figure: what you pay
Same wall, but you pay the gang £720 a day and your library says £624. Choose Enter an all-in crew cost and type 720. The trade rates are scaled by 1.153846, so the bricklayer prices at £34.6154 and the labourer at £20.7692, and the crew adds up to the £720 you actually pay. The breakdown shows both figures and the factor between them.
One figure: how fast
Access to the rear elevation is restricted, so the gang gets through 2.4 m² an hour rather than 3. Untick Standard conditions, say what differs, and enter the revised output. Everything else recalculates.