Change proposal item cost options

When creating a proposal item in a proposal, you can add several staff, equipment and/or subcontractor costs as needed. Occasionally, you might want to change these costs due to inflation, seasonal price fluctuations, etc. You can update these rates through the Admin site.

Steps

• Go to your Admin page and click "Cost Options" option under the "Quote_Items" group:

• From the list of existing cost options, select the one you want to update by clicking its ID. You can filter the view using the filters on the right-hand side of the window.

Note that you should retain a historical record of these changes. It is generally preferable to create a new cost option with the updated rates and set an end date on the existing cost option to retire it.

To create new cost option with the changed rates, follow these steps:

• Set the 'End' date on the currently active cost option and click 'Save and continue editing'.

• Update the cost rates as required. You can apply four different rates:

• Field work, per day
• Field work, per hour
• Office work, per day
• Office work, per hour

• Scroll down and set the 'Start' date to the day after the 'End' date you just set on the previous cost option. Clear the 'End' field so the new cost option has no expiry, then click 'Save as new'.

• This preserves the previous rates on the now-retired cost option and saves the updated rates as a new active cost option:

Any cost option that has passed its 'End' date will appear as outdated in the frontend proposal item editor, alerting users that the rates are no longer current.

The "Staff" Checkbox

Each cost option includes a Staff checkbox. This setting controls whether the hours and days defined in this cost option are counted towards the hours budget of any proposal item that uses it.

When Staff is ticked, the field days, field hours, office days, and office hours on this cost option are included in the proposal item's budget hours calculation. These budget hours are used throughout Kompass for:

• The Hours column in the project status update: the budget hours per unit (used to convert diary hours to a percentage or unit count).
• Automatic task creation: when tasks are generated from a proposal item, only costs with Staff ticked are used to determine whether to create a Field task, an Office task, or both, and how many days/hours to assign to each.
• The schedule view: the budget hours figure displayed on the project overview comes from staff costs only.

When Staff is not ticked, the cost contributes to the financial totals (costs and price) of the proposal item but its hours and days are excluded from all budget hours calculations. This is the correct setting for equipment, subcontractor, or overhead costs where the days/hours do not represent direct staff time.

As a general rule, tick Staff on any cost option that represents a person's time, and leave it unticked for equipment, materials, subcontractors, and other non-labour costs.