Typically you estimate material costs in terms of units like Each, or Square Feet, but what if you want to estimate the labor to install it in terms of hours?
In ContractorTools, you can enter labor and subcontract costs as "rate based" costs instead of cost per unit.
For example, say you enter an estimate item for the installation of 5 doors; the item quantity is 5, but the labor will take 2 hours per door. How would you enter that?
You would enter the item quantity as 5, and enter the cost of each door as the material cost per unit (Each).
Then to enter the labor cost, you could enter it in terms of dollar cost per door, but alternatively, you can enter the labor in terms of hours. To do that, tap "Rate and Productivity", then enter:
the hourly cost rate (burdened labor cost per hour),
the "productivity" - the hours per unit, or the units per hour.
What is "productivity"? Productivity is how many units can be completed in an hour, or how many hours it takes to complete 1 unit.
In the case of something like doors, if it takes 2 hours to install a door, the productivity would be 2 hours per unit. In the case of something like painting (and say the unit of measure is square feet), the labor productivity would be some number of square feet per hour.
When you enter the labor cost as the hourly cost rate and productivity (units per hour), then ContractorTools will automatically calculate the number of number of hours for that item based on the Quantity entered for that item.
What this means is, if you can set up items in job templates with the labor entered as "Rate and Productivity", then when you create a job from that template, ContractorTools will automatically calculate the labor hours for those items when you enter a quantity for them.