If you are using both HeavyBid and HeavyJob, you have the ability to quickly and easily bring your estimate’s activities into HeavyJob as budgets and trackable cost codes.
Many users, before exporting their estimate to HeavyJob, review their estimate using the “Export to HeavyJob and Accounting” module (The blue dollar sign icon under the “Exchange” menu). This exchange utility will let you easily auto-fill your HeavyJob Cost Codes for each activity, check your quantities, extract resources for your budget, and review your changes before sending it to accounting or HeavyJob. This process of changing activity codes to job codes is called conforming the estimate.
Before you conform your estimate for HeavyJob, it is highly recommended that you make a copy of the winning estimate, and make your changes to the copy so that the original is not altered.
A Better Way to Conform Your Estimate:
Open the Estimate Entry > Spreadsheet view to review all of your activities and customize your view to see and edit what you are sending to HeavyJob.
In this view take advantage of these things:
- Check your activity descriptions are unique and not repetitive. These descriptions will be transferred to the HeavyJob cost code description, and you want it to be as descriptive as you can
- Check the “Units” column for Lump Sum items. While great for estimating, a unit of Lump Sum eliminates nearly all of your reporting and analysis options in HeavyJob. Be sure to ask why this activity is a lump sum, if there are any man-hours associated with the activity if this is a total sub, and how it could be more useful to your team when it is transferred to HeavyJob.
- Customize your view to include fields like “alt cost code.” If you typically key in your cost codes, this will make it easier to code with more information in front of you. Additionally, if you use the Activity Codebook, you can set up your standard cost codes in the at cost code field, so activities come in pre-coded the next time you add them to an estimate, automating the often tedious coding process. As a bonus, it will also make it that much easier to track historical cost in HeavyBid, pulling data directly from HeavyJob through the Production History screen.
- See the Notes. Activity notes from the estimator will be transferred to HeavyJob directly into the cost code notes. You can view if there are any notes in the activity at the top, or if you need to add any additional information. If you want to review your notes at a glance, the Notes Report (Reports Menu > Cost Reports > Notes Report) is a quick way to see all the notes in the estimate. Though useful for estimating, the activity notes are extremely useful for sharing information with the field to explain how the work is planned to be done to additional information like expected site conditions or owner requirements.
If you need any help with this, call our support. We are available every day, all the time at – 1-800-444-3196.
Mitch Manning says
Using this process/module this will allow individual activities to be assigned its own Cost Code even though it’s used in a bid item with numerous activities prior to be exported to HJ or accounting software?
Matt Fidler says
Yes, the spreadsheet view will allow you to cost code each activity in the estimate, then when you go to the Export to HeavyJob/Accounting screen, you can use the copy tool at the bottom to copy from the Alt Cost Code. The number of cost codes and the level of detail is up to you. You could assign a biditem only one cost code, each activity to its own cost code, or somewhere in between.