Part II: How to include all the costs in your estimates
Monday, May 04th, 2020
This is the second in a series of three articles on knowing your costs, for improved financial health and a better chance of winning good profitable work. You’ll find the other two articles here:
- Part I: How to reduce your overheads >>
- Part III: How to price for profit and not just to fill the diary >>
Not many people have the capacity to remember every last item that needs including in an estimate. It took an entire development team months and months to research costs, build the calculators, test them, then test again. No mean feat, and many hundreds of thousands of pounds later, we arrived at EstimatorXpress. Then there’s the second team that regularly sweeps the builders merchant prices to keep the software updated.
The developers produced calculators for every stage of a build, consisting of the labour, the materials, the equipment, and the plant. There’s also a calculation for skips, fuel, wear and tear, wastage, inflation, profit and more. And the team is always adding yet more valuable features to the award-winning software.
A decent spreadsheet is certainly better than nothing, but they’re error-prone. Hidden cells, broken formulae…
EstimatorXpress gives you prompts to include all the chargeable hours for all your own hours visiting the site, visiting the customer, and so on. The owner’s own time is often overlooked, especially if they’re not on the tools.
And it’s not over when the estimate has been accepted. It’s really just the start. You need to follow through on the estimate’s promises and not go over the estimated costs. Which is why we include a build program, materials list, cutting list, labour schedule, cash flow analysis, stage payment schedule and more.
Take a look at the other goals in the HBXL re-start action plan
There are lots more ideas on getting business-ready for when we ‘come out of the other side’ here >>
Next step
EstimatorXpress can help your re-start be a positive one, so why not have an online demonstration with one of the HBXL Building Software team. We’ve made lots of hour-long slots available. And if you have more time available at your end, you could trial the software for 14-days. We’re here, ready to chat on 0117 916 7898.
