Overview
Use unique service tasks for each labor type or cost to efficiently set project labor budgets.
Who uses this feature
Administrators, Office Employees, Managers, Project Managers, Estimators, Accountants, Bookkeepers, Technicians.
Applies to all business types. Primarily for project management users who use the Budget vs Actual table to track labor expenses.
Applies to all trades
Things to know
Using a service task per labor type increases efficiency when creating estimates to populate a project's budget while ensuring the accuracy of your labor costs.
Labor services are services that have the labor service checkbox selected. This box needs to be checked in order for labor costs to populate in Work in Progress summary reporting.
Adopting this approach helps ensure that your cost and revenue line items are separate for projects that use the Application for Payment workflow.
Create labor services
Pricebook service items are used to sell your services on estimates and invoices. In project management projects, service tasks are also used to inform and populate the budgets for labor costs.
By having a service task for each type of labor you offer, you can make the bidding process more efficient because each service task contains an estimated labor cost that is unique to the service task.
To create a service task for labor services:
Go to the navigation bar and click Pricebook.
On the Services screen that opens, click + Add Service.
On the Add a Service screen that opens, add the relevant service details, such as Code, Name, Description, and General Ledger Account.
Check the Labor Service checkbox. This ensures that the associated labor costs pull through into Work in Progress summary reporting.
Enter the Estimated Labor Cost for the type of labor you are creating. The value you enter should represent one hour worth of cost. For example, if plumbing labor represents a $35 overhead per hour, you'd enter $35.00 in the Estimated Labor Cost field.
Note: The estimated labor cost is based on the cost for one hour of working time. This field only applies to project-based budgeting and doesn't affect job costing or price setting.
When finished, click Save. If you want to add another item, click Save and add another to save and add your next item.
See Add a service for more information on adding services to the pricebook.
Use labor services to set project budgets
After you've created the various labor services you need for your business or project, you can then use them when creating your project estimates or bids. Because each labor service contains its respective cost, you just need to add the labor service item to the project estimate and adjust the quantity to reflect the desired budgeted total.
For example, adding a HVAC-LABOR task with an estimated labor cost of $30 to a new estimate adds $30 in cost to the estimate's cost totals.
If you need to budget for additional hours of this labor cost, you can adjust the quantity to reflect the total amount of hours you plan to budget for on the estimate. In this example, you need to budget for 20 hours of HVAC labor time, so you edit the quantity from 1 to 20.
By editing the quantity, you enhance efficiency in your workflow while ensuring the accuracy of the labor budget. The value in this workflow approach is further enhanced when you're budgeting for multiple labor types or costs on the same estimate.
You can also use this approach when uploading estimates from templates.
Select the value in Column E and enter the number of hours. Then, press Enter to move down the column to the next value. This allows you to efficiently enter the labor quantities all from your keyboard, reducing manual clicks.
