What changes if I use the estimates & job costing feature on a project?

What changes if I use the estimates & job costing feature on a project?

Kevin Fitzpatrick

The Estimates & Job Costing feature affects the areas of your project where you may be adding or creating budget data, namely the Specs & Selections and the Financials pages.

On these pages, once budget tracking is on, you'll see fields appear for building out your estimated costs for the financial-related items on your projects. This includes letting you create cost lines and markup for each item in your specs & selections.

In addition to the standard summary of selection and change order information on the Financials Summary page, you will also see tabs for the project's "Estimate" and "Budget".

The Estimate will be the place where you'll build the budget for your project and view all of the financials for your selections in a spreadsheet-style interface.

The Budget will be where you can view budget information and enter budget actuals for all expenses and revenue across your project, organized by accounting code. This will show a summary of the budget information entered on selection items and change orders, in addition to "other line items" that aren't linked to the selection sheet.

Overall, this feature allows you to build out your expected costs for the project, input your markup, margin and tax values to determine your sell price and then track variances against those costs through your selections, change orders and budget actuals. In order to use the budgeting feature in CoConstruct effectively, you’ll want to first set up your accounting codes in the system in a way that will allow you to track your costs at the level you wish.