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A Price Book serves as your basis for making Bids quickly and accurately. It contains Price Book Items, complete with current Prices, and related information such as Markup Descriptions, Budgets, Cost Types, etc.
A Price Book serves as a foundation for your Bids. Each Bid is based on a Price Book, and is attached to that Price Book. Each Price Book has a Bid List associated with it.
You may have as many Price Books as you wish, given room on your hard disk. (Price Books usually range in size from 500 KB to 20 MB.) Each Price Book has an eight-character Code, and a longer Description.
Each Price Book contains:
* Price Book Items
* Divisions and Subdivisions to group Items
* Cost Types to categorize costs by labor, material, etc.
* Crews to perform labor tasks (an optional feature)
* Budgets for accounting and job costing of Items
* Questions to fill-in Item Bid Quantities quickly (an optional feature)
* Unit Suggestions
* Assemblies which allow you to select related groups of Items quickly (optional)
* Super Assemblies allow you to select groups of Assemblies (optional)
* Markups for taxes, overhead, profit, etc.
* Cost Table to store commonly-used costs, and quickly update many Items (optional)
* Adjustments to add inflation or regional modifiers to many Items at once (optional)
* Vendors to track suppliers, subcontractors, etc. (optional)
* Locations to group Items in a Bid by area or phase of construction
* Bids
List windows to access most of this information is available from the Price-Book menu on the menu bar.
You can view and edit a list of currently-installed Price Books by selecting Price Book List from the File menu.
The List of Available Price Books shows you all the Price Books which have been installed to work with EasyEst Estimating. The Price Book List is accessed from the File Menu. From this List, you may add, delete, copy, rename or use a Bid from any of these Price Books.
Some Price Books are often shipped with the program. You may also purchase additional, pre-built Price Books for your particular industry. Pre-Built Price Books can save weeks or even months of time in creating your Price Books. (You will still want to put in costs appropriate for your area.) To see the Price Books which are currently installed, select Price Book List from the File menu.
Price Books that come with the system may be installed when you install the EasyEst Estimating. If you later decide to install an additional Price Book, you may re-install just the Price Books without losing an Bids in other Price Books.
To install an additional Price Book, exit the EasyEst Estimating program, and run the installer (usually by running A:\SETUP from Windows). The next time you start EasyEst Estimating, the newly-installed Price Book will be added to the List of Available Price Books. Just select it using the instructions below.
To select an existing Price Book, the easiest way is open a Bid in that Price Book. (There is always a Bid open, even if it doesn't have a name yet.) Just select Open Existing Bid... from the File menu, and then choose the appropriate Price Book from the Price Book combo box. You may also change Price Books in the New Bid dialog box.
If you are in the List of Available Price Books, you can select a Price Book to use by highlighting the Price Book you want, and then pressing the Use key (F8) or toolbar button. The Open Bid dialog box will be brought up, with the Bids for the selected Price Book shown.
To add a new, blank Price Book, just type a Code and Description for it, and press Use (F8). This will give you a blank Price Book to start from scratch.
It is often easier to modify an existing Price Book than to start from scratch. You may either rename a Sample Price Book, or make a copy of it. Then make all the changes you need.
To copy a Price Book, highlight the Price Book you want to copy in the Price Book List and choose Copy Record from the Edit menu. You will be asked for the new Price Book’s Code and Description. Copying a Price Book also copies all the Bids associated with the Price Book. You may wish to delete all of the Bids in the new Price Book except those you use as templates.
You cannot copy the Price Book you are currently working on. If want to copy the current Price Book, Open any Bid from a different Price Book first.
To rename a Price Book, just change its Code and/or Description in the List of Available Price Books. As with copying, you cannot rename the Price Book you are currently working in.
To delete a Price Book, select Delete Record from the Edit menu. Deleting Price Books you do not need can save megabytes of disk space. Note that you cannot delete the Price Book you are working in. (If you want to get rid of it, switch to a different Price Book first, and then delete it from the List of Available Price Books.)
The Item Code Format column in the List of Available Price Books shows the format for the Item Codes. For instance, the Standard Item Code Format is DD.SII. DD.SII indicates two digits for the Division Code (DD), a decimal, then another digit for the Subdivision Code (S), and finally two more digits for the Item Code (II), making the complete Item Code DD.SII. For instance, 16.215 is a legal Item Code, with 16 as the Division Code, and 16.2 as the Subdivision Code.
The Wide Item Code Format is DD.SSIII, which gives you an extra digit for both Subdivision and Item. An example of Wide Item Code is 16.02015, where 16 is the Division Code, and 16.02 is the Subdivision Code. Every Price Book must use one of these two formats.
If you are using Level 3, you can widen the Item Code Format for any existing Price Book which uses the standard format. Just go to the Item Code Format column for the Price Book you wish to widen (it can even be the one currently in use), and type DD.SSIII. (If you forget exactly what the format is, EasyEst Estimating will help you out.)
See Also: Building a Price Book
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