SUBCONTRACTOR COMPARISON
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Subcontractor comparisons are exceptionally useful for comparing the cost of self-performing work for direct cost items against hiring a subcontractor to carry out those works. It allows you to account for any scope differences between the subcontractor’s pricing information that you’ve received, to analyze the prices, and then select the best option. Your subcontractor comparisons are managed here in the Subcontractor Comparisons window.
To add a new comparison, click add comparison. You can then set an appropriate name and description for your comparison and see a summary of its key details here.
First, we need to open up Subcontractor Comparisons. This lists out all of the different comparisons in this project. Let’s select this comparison here, and then click on view details. The grid in the Subcontractor Details window summarizes key details about each subcontractor as they’re added. You can specify the subcontractor’s name, add notes and review the pricing.
Here in the Subcontractor Details window, we can select the Manage Items ribbon menu button. Opening this window allows you to select and add any unfinished items to the comparison by clicking the checkbox here.
When the box is checked, you’ll be able to review and modify the name of the automatically created resource, which will be applied in the Cost Estimate of the selected items once a subcontractor has been selected.
Once you’ve created a subcontractor comparison, and selected the items to be managed by it, you can go through the important process of bringing in prices collected from different subcontractors.
We can see the details for each item here; the item numbers, the descriptions, and so on.
These are the prices we’ve received from Darryl’s Digging
After reviewing each subcontractor and their prices we can make the decision now and select Earl’s Excavation as our preferred subcontractor. We can now see that the percent differences have updated, showing the other options are more expensive than the selected subcontractor.
When you change the rates, for example, if you need to update exchange rates, the schedule rate will update when you confirm the changes in Subcontractor Comparison. The tick you can see here indicates which of the subcontractors has been selected and confirmed within this comparison.
The analysis window provides a read only view of all of the key information about each one of the subcontractors in the selected comparison.
The subcontractor total amount includes any adjustment from the independent Cost Estimate which may have been set up for any subcontractor.
Here’s a very helpful tip, underneath each column in the bar at the bottom, if you right click you can see a sum total of each column.
You can now also add Direct Cost Schedule items to an existing subcontractor comparison from the Direct Cost Schedule window. It’s a simple process, using the right click context menu. If you want to add an item to a particular subcontractor when you are in a direct cost schedule and have selected an item, you can right click and select ‘add to existing Subcontractor Comparison. Then select an existing Subcontractor Comparison and that cost schedule item will be added there.
We can see when we go to Subcontractor Comparisons and then to Details and then to Manage Items, that this item has been added there.
To save you time you can also clone Subcontractors within a Subcontractor Comparison.
For example, here is a Subcontractor Comparison with all the rates completed. We can easily create an entire carbon copy of this comparison by cloning it. Any values and information we have in the grid will be cloned. You can think of cloning like doing copy and paste with just one button. This is particularly useful if you need to make a slight alteration or create another version without changing the original quote.
And that’s an introduction to Subcontractor Comparisons. To find out more about this feature, have a look at the relevant links provided in the description box below.
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