Rate Book
Your pricing memory. Your own rates sit in it, and each supplier's price list sits beside them as its own book. When the assistant prices an estimate line it searches all of them at once and shows you where the number came from; your own rate wins a tie with a supplier's. Every rate carries its receipts: where it came from, how many times it has been seen, how much those sightings agree, and when it was last confirmed. The estimator or director who owns the numbers uses this page.
Seven tabs. Rates is the book itself. Imports is where spreadsheets and price lists are staged for approval. Match test replays your priced jobs through the matcher to see how much the book prices on its own. Missing rates lists what you keep pricing that is not in the book. Labour rates holds the $/hr by trade. Estimating rules lists the standing rules saved from chat. Settings holds the AI rate controls.
A few words, translated. A rate is one reusable thing at one unit ("Plasterboard to walls, 13mm, supply and install" per m²), not a project line. The figure is what it costs you; sell prices are kept for the record but never averaged in, and margin is a policy set per job, never baked into a rate. An observation is every sighting of a rate: a job you priced, a quote you imported, a row you uploaded. The confidence band (tight, moderate, loose) says how many observations sit behind the rate and how much they agree. A rate with agreeing observations becomes trusted and is applied without asking again; the Trusted column says until when.
- The book is ex GST. Check one row against an invoice before you import a thousand.
- Import cost, not sell. A supplier list usually has both columns; the sell one imported as cost under-prices every job by your own margin.
- Every rate needs a real unit (m², LM, EA, hr, day, lump). "as per quote" and "allow" are not units; a row without one is skipped at commit.
- A trade's $/hr belongs on Labour rates, not in the book. A rule ("we never supply appliances") belongs in chat. The book holds prices per unit and refuses rules on purpose.
- On Rates, press Add Rate.
- Type the description (the thing first, then its spec; no rooms, levels, clients or drawing numbers), pick the trade section and unit, and enter the base rate, labour hours per unit and labour $/hr if you have them.
- Save. The book's quality gate runs on the server: a description that does not name the item, a unit that is not real, or a duplicate of a rate you already hold comes back as a refusal with the problems and a cleaned-up proposal. Open the existing rate instead, confirm a genuine per-occurrence allowance as a lump, or say how this one differs to create it anyway.
- Click a description, unit, rate, hours or labour-rate cell to edit it in place. A renamed row passes the same gate as a new one; the server stores the tidied description and the canonical unit.
- Tick rows to change their trade, link supplier prices to the business they came from, or delete them. Deleting twenty or more takes a snapshot first.
- On Imports, press Import spreadsheet. A spreadsheet in any layout, a PDF price list or quote, or a photo of one all work. Upload a file or pick one already in Documents; a file you attached in chat is already there.
- Base reads it and shows what it found: the rows, how it read each one, and a few questions where something is unclear, such as whether the figures are your cost or a sell price, and which supplier the list is from. Lines that read as rules rather than prices are set aside, to keep as estimating rules if you want them, never as a rate.
- Press Stage. Rows are tidied in the background in small batches: name rewritten to one shape, unit and trade checked, duplicates grouped, anything doubtful flagged. You can leave and come back.
- Open the batch. Rows are grouped by trade, each showing the tidied name with the original underneath, the unit, the price, a confidence and flags. Approve a whole trade when it reads right, Reject rest for what you do not want, or approve and reject row by row. Nothing is in the book yet.
- Press the commit button. Approved rows become rates with the sheet as their evidence; rows judged to be the same item become one rate with several observations. Supplier rows become that supplier's book. From this moment the matcher can use them.
What the flags mean: all-in rate (labour and material rolled into one figure; fine to approve, the split is in the notes), unit guessed (the sheet's unit was blank; glance at it), unit changed or unit conflict (the description says one unit and the row carries another; check it, a real m² stored as m³ makes every area rate wrong), lump sum, sell price (looks like a sell price although the sheet was declared cost; check one against an invoice), duplicate (approve both, they become one rate with two observations).
- On Imports, press Import from Project.
- Pick a completed job. Its approved lines are listed, de-duplicated; tick the ones worth keeping.
- Import. They arrive as historical evidence, seen once, so they still need a second sighting before they trust themselves.
- Each supplier's list is its own tab on Rates, with its row count and the date of its newest price. A tab is marked stale when no price is newer than a set number of days; the tab says how many.
- Re-upload the list through Imports and approve it the same way. The newest price date on the tab moves, and earlier prices stay as evidence.
- On Labour rates, pick the category and whether it is your internal crew or a named subcontractor, enter the $/hr (cost), and save.
- Organise with AI cleans descriptions and units, seeds categories from your rates and asks internal-versus-sub per rate.
- On Match test, start a test over the jobs you pick. Every priced line is replayed through the matcher and lands as verified, check, unit-blocked, gap or genuine lump.
- Check matches walks you through a sample of fifty: right, close, wrong, nothing fits, or pick the right one. Your verdicts are recorded.
- Missing rates turns the gaps into a list of what you keep pricing that is not in the book. For each, create the rate (Base suggests, tests and creates it), send it to Imports, treat it as a one-off, or ignore it.
- On Settings, Record AI-estimated rates decides whether a rate the assistant guessed is saved into the book, marked as a guess. Use AI rates in estimates decides whether those guesses are offered when matching.
- Remove AI-proposed rates deletes every guess in one go. Rates a person confirmed or imported are untouched.
- Book history on the Match test tab lists every snapshot. One is taken before every import commit, bulk delete and match test, and Take a snapshot makes one by hand.
- Open a snapshot to see what changed since, and restore it. Every deleted or changed rate is kept for 400 days.
- Every rate you confirm or correct while reviewing an estimate is recorded as an observation against the book, with who did it and on which job. This is the primary way the book grows. Ten reviewed estimates make a better book than any spreadsheet.
- A confirmed rate is ranked above an AI-proposed one when matching. Confirming is what promotes a number to trusted.
- Everything here can be driven from chat: attach the file and say what it is, ask how an import is going, approve a trade by name, ask which suppliers are stale. The assistant will not copy rows straight into the book, and will not approve them for you unless you say which.
- The book deliberately does not learn from its own suggestions. Only rates a person confirmed, or real observations from a job, move it. Guesses are marked as such and ranked below anything real.
- A rate that has not been used in a year wears its tight badge with less authority than it looks. Check when it was last confirmed before leaning on it.
- Rates are indicative for built items like joinery. Those are priced from their bill of materials, with the rate as a sanity check.
- Archived and discontinued lines on a supplier's sheet come in too; the importer does not read an "archived" column. Reject that group at review or trim the sheet first.
- The Estimating rules tab is read and delete only. Reword a rule by asking the assistant; delete one here to stop it being used.
- The estimate — where rates are confirmed and corrected
- Contacts — the suppliers whose price lists become books