Labor Rates per Category

Naturally, as with most organizations, there are many different labor rates depending on roles and specific labor being performed to produce a product or deliver a service. In order to generate estimates for a prospective project/job, Estimators need to have labor rates that are at least reasonably in the ballpark of what the organization can expect to incur. These rates are most commonly derived from historical actuals that include employee wages, payroll taxes (i.e., FICA, FUTA, SUTA), plus some appropriation of insurance benefits. These ‘Fully-Burdened’ labor costs form the basis for you to populate the labor rate table in Settings > Options > Labor.

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To add or edit labor rates, right-click anywhere in the list to open a pop-up context menu.
Click ‘Add Category’ to enter a description, then ‘Edit RT Rate’ to enter the ‘Regular Time’ rate and ‘Edit OT Rate’ for ‘Overtime’.

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Labor Rates used in Estimating

If you are utilizing Crows Nest’s Estimating, these rate values are used to estimate your labor costs on a scope of work to be produced. Hours x Rate ($) = Amount($). These amounts become your ‘Budgeted’ labor costs, that when combined with material costs and markup(s), become the price you are quoting in your proposal for the bid invitation.

When you’ve been awarded the project, and ‘Process Estimate’, these values are carried over to the creation of the phases (aka: ‘Work Orders’, ‘Releases’) as the labor budgets.

Labor Rates in Job Costing

Whether you are leveraging Crows Nest’s Estimating to automatically create your budgets on your phases, or manually entering budget records into the 'Cost' form, you now have budget amounts (A & B) to compare to actual labor punches (C) to determine whether you are under or over budget.

Project Labor Value

The value for Labor Is generated by the above labor record using the above labor category rates.