Build Your Labor, Equipment and Material Libraries in Contractor Estimate Pro

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Your libraries are your rates. Enter your labor, equipment and material costs once, and every crew, pay item and template pulls from them. When a rate changes, you update it in one place.

Everything in this guide lives on the Libraries tab and is stored on your device. Libraries are free to use. You can add and edit everything here without a subscription.

What you'll need

• Contractor Estimate Pro, with your company header set up (Set up your company header and PDF options)

• Your hourly labor rates

• Your hourly equipment rates

• Recent material prices from your suppliers

About the numbers in this guide: every rate and price below is an example number for our sitework job. They are not real prices. Use your own.

What's on the Libraries tab

Tap Libraries at the bottom of the screen. The Libraries screen lists:

Library — What it says on screen

Labor — Manage labor types and rates

Equipment — Manage equipment types and rates

Crew Templates — Build reusable crew templates (next guide)

Pay Item Templates — Manage reusable pay item templates (later guide)

Job Templates — Manage reusable job/estimate templates (later guide)

Materials — Manage material library

Subcontractors — Manage subcontractors

Units — Manage units of measure

Each library opens as its own list. Tap the back arrow at the top left (it reads ResourcesList) to get back to the Libraries screen.

Step 1: Add your labor types and hourly rates

Tap the Libraries tab, then Labor. Add each labor type and its hourly rate. Enter the rate for one worker. You set how many workers when you put them on a crew.

For our sitework job (example numbers):

Labor type — Hourly rate (example)

Operator — $60.00

Laborer — $50.00

These match the Silt Fence crew in the next guide. On its pay item, 1 Operator shows $60.00/hr and 2 Laborers show $100.00/hr, so one Laborer is $50.00/hr.

Step 2: Add your equipment

Go back and open Equipment. Each machine has a name, a Type and an hourly rate.

The type lists themselves live in Settings → Edit Material and Equipment Types. Add your own types there, like Compaction or Paving, before you add the machines.

The Equipment screen gives you:

• Filter chips across the top to show one type at a time: All, Excavators, Misc and Trucking in this example

• A Search equipment box

• Each machine with its type (for example Type: Trucking) and its rate in $/hr

• A red trash icon to delete a machine

• A blue + button at the bottom right to add one

Some examples from this library:

Equipment — Type — Rate (example)

Kubota U27 — Excavators — $55.00/hr

30T Excavator — Excavators — $175.00/hr

Dozer — Misc — $130.00/hr

3/4 Ton Pickup Truck — Trucking — $65.00/hr

Lowboy — Trucking — $50.00/hr

On our Silt Fence pay item, the crew uses a Mini Excavator at $60.00/hr.

Step 3: Add your materials with unit cost and type

Open Materials and add each material with its unit, its unit cost and a type. Material types come from the same place as equipment types: Settings → Edit Material and Equipment Types.

For our sitework job:

Material — Unit — Unit cost (example)

Silt Fence — FT — $1.25

Enter the price before tax. Tax isn't part of the library price. It comes from each estimate's Material Sales Tax (%), which you set on the estimate's General Information screen. Our example estimate uses 6%.

How it shows up on a bid. When you add the material to a pay item with + Add Material, the Edit Material sheet opens. Pick Silt Fence from the Material dropdown, and its price comes in as the Unit Price for that line (1.25). You can change it for that one line, add a Flat Delivery Fee ($), tap Open Material Calculator, or turn on Add Trucking. Pay items are covered in full in a later guide.

On our 750 LF Silt Fence pay item:

Step — Math — Result

Base — 750 FT × $1.25 — $937.50

Tax — 6% of $937.50 — $56.25

Material total — $937.50 + $56.25 — $993.75

The pay item shows the tax per foot rounded to $0.07/FT. The total uses the exact figure, $56.25.

Step 4: Keep prices current with price history

Supplier prices change. When you update a material's price in Materials, the app keeps a price history for it, so you can see how a price has moved over time.

Example: your supplier raises Silt Fence from $1.25 to $1.35 per FT. Open Silt Fence in Materials and change the price to $1.35. The old price stays on record.

Step 5: Add your subcontractors

Open Subcontractors and add the subs you use, like a paving or seeding sub. You'll put their price on the pay item under Subcontracted Tasks when you build the bid.

Step 6: Add any custom units

If you bid in a unit that isn't in the list, add it in Units. Our job bids in LS, LF, CY and SY, and the silt fence material is priced by the FT.

Step 7: Move your libraries to another device

Libraries can be exported and imported as library JSON files. Use this to put your rates on a second phone or tablet, or to give an estimator the same rates you use. Export on one device, send the file over, and import it on the other.

Your libraries are stored on the device. They do not sync on their own.

What happens to old bids when a rate changes

Changing a rate in your library does not change estimates you've already built. Your old bids keep the rates they were built with. If you want an estimate to use your new rates, you choose to update it with a separate button. Nothing changes until you do.

Tips

• Do it once, well. Every crew and bid pulls from these rates. Ten minutes here saves you on every bid.

• Use the type filters. Give every machine a type so the filter chips stay useful when your list gets long. Set up the types in Settings → Edit Material and Equipment Types.

• Rate per person, count in the crew. Enter one Laborer at $50.00/hr. Two laborers on a crew is a count, not a new labor type.

• Back up after a big setup. Use Backup & Restore in Settings once your libraries are in.

FAQ

Do I need a subscription to use Libraries? No. Adding and editing labor, equipment, materials and crews is free. You need a subscription only to create and edit estimates.

Where does material tax come from? From the estimate, not the library. Set Material Sales Tax (%) on each estimate's General Information screen.

Do my libraries sync to the cloud? No. They live on your device. Use library export and import, or Backup & Restore, to move them.

I raised a rate. Did my old bids change? No. Existing estimates keep their rates until you choose to update that estimate with the new ones.

Next guide: Make crew templates with production rates →