Calibrating Goldenseal Estimating

This page explains how to calibrate unit prices in the Goldenseal estimating software.

Calibrating Unit Prices
Why Calibrate | How to Calibrate

Website Links
Estimating Software | Project Management Software

RELATED TOPICS
Assemblies | Cost Items | Estimates

Goldenseal includes unit costs for several business types.

To get Goldenseal to hit on the nose for your own projects, you will need to adjust its prices so they'll match your own conditions.

Why Calibrate?

You'll need to adjust unit costs for a number of reasons, including:

Regional differences-- some areas are more expensive than others.
Economic differences-- costs are usually higher during booms, and lower during busts.
Business differences-- every industry has different niches with different costs and types of work
Quality differences-- the same item will usually cost more when doing high end work, because of the extra care taken.

How to Calibrate

The best way to calibrate Goldenseal is to get it to hit exactly for one or more projects you have already completed (or at least estimated by some other method).

To do so, follow these steps:

Gather job cost information for one or more projects that you've already completed.
Open Goldenseal, and choose Estimates from the Income menu.
Click the New button. Enter information about the project.
Click on the breakdown popup, and choose Items.
Click in the breakdown table, and enter all of the items of work that you included in this project.
When you have entered everything, check the total against your actual costs.
Adjust the Assemblies and Cost Items in the estimate to more closely match your costs.
Go back to the estimate and click the Update Prices button.
Repeat the previous two steps until Goldenseal's price is the same as yours.

HINT-- You will probably want to be very cautious about your first few project estimates, until you are confident that you've adjusted the stock unit costs to match your own costs accurately.