Takeoff costing and per unit

Link cost-database resources to each assembly line. Per unit is hours or days of that resource for one unit of the material line — not a share of cost per linear metre.

Under the assembly build-up is Costing. Each material line (excavation, earthwork support, disposal, and so on) can link to cost items, labour, gangs or plant from your cost database. A custom assembly lists the material rows you authored — not the specification fields on the form. A material you pick is remembered for that exact material and size on every future assembly; labour and plant links are stored for the next job with Save labour and plant as default.

A cost item (a material rate) has no per-unit box. Its quantity is the line quantity. A cubic metre of excavation uses that item once per cubic metre.

Labour, gangs and plant have a per unit box. That box is a labour or plant norm: how many hours or days of that resource you need for one unit of the material line.

Look at the unit under the line title. Excavation is m³. Earthwork support is m². Per unit follows that unit, not the length you drew on the plan.

The strip foundation is measured as a length. The recipe already turned that length into m³. You do not type a cost per linear metre here.

Per unit is not a percentage of the gang’s cost. Typing 0.1 does not mean “10% of the gang per metre of trench”. It means 0.1 hours (or 0.1 days, if the gang is priced per day) per 1 m³ of excavation.

The value saves when you leave the box (tab or click away). Type 0.1, then leave the field. A leading decimal such as .1, or a comma 0,1, is ignored and the box can snap back to 1.

Picking a cost item for a material line links it for this measurement and remembers it as the firm’s choice for that material at that thickness or size — the next assembly that needs the same material is priced with it and appears in the Linking Assistant’s activity log. Tick Just this once before picking if the choice is only for this measurement. Save labour and plant as default stores the labour, gang and plant links for this component on the next job. Link resource adds another item, labour, gang or plant to the same line.

When you measure, the app snapshots the current rate. The labour force report reads those snapshots. Changing the library later does not rewrite a measurement you already took.