Getting Project Unit Costs

NOTE-- We retired the MacNail and BidMagic estimating programs in 2000, and replaced them with Goldenseal construction estimating software. Goldenseal is an integrated program that also includes accounting, scheduling and contract writing. We keep these instructions online for our die-hard BidMagic and MacNail users! The calibration process for the Goldenseal estimating software, is similar to that for our older programs.

What you need from the actual projects

Naturally, the more accurate the numbers for the actual construction project you use for a comparison, the more accurate you'll be able to make our estimating software. If you can, go back through your old records, and dig up as much cost information as possible about the project or projects that you'll be using for calibrating the estimators.

If there were any special situations that happened on the project (e.g. bad weather or picky clients) it helps to keep them in mind when figuring prices-- you may want to adjust the actual costs up or down to reflect more "normal" conditions.

If you have good, detailed job cost information about a project you've already finished, you can probably get by with using just one project for calibrating your estimators-- although you'll be more accurate if you use more than one.
If you are working with "fuzzy" cost data, you should definitely use several projects to calibrate your estimators.

NOTE: If you do a wide range of project types, you may want to create several different estimators (e.g. a "high end" estimator and a "low end" estimator) with different prices, to match the different types of projects that you do. You'll use the same basic calibrating techniques for each of them, using the appropriate types of projects for each estimator.

Whatever the quality of the numbers you start with, in the future it's worthwhile to use the MacNail accounting software to job cost each of the projects that you estimate with the MacNail estimating software. Its detailed job cost information will help you to refine the accuracy of your estimates in the future. It will also help you to manage your projects more efficiently while you're still working on them!