Using and Modifying Assemblies in Estimator

This article offers an overview of Assemblies in Estimator; how to access them, use them to add costs to your estimate, and how to make changes to line items associated with assemblies. 

Set Assembly Grouping

Assemblies are accessed via the Cost Database pane in the Estimate View. The Cost Database pane has a Line Items tab and an Assembly tab - select the Assembly tab.

If you don't see any assemblies in the list, don't worry - this just means that you don't have any grouping set up. As the warning message says, you simply need to "Configure the grouping via the gear icon to view assemblies". To configure grouping, click on the Gear icon.

In the Configure Grouping window, select one or more Group Items in the list on the left (hold CTRL on your keyboard while clicking to select multiple items).

Now click on the blue arrow pointing right to add your selection to the list of Active Group Items on the right.

The order of the Active Group Items determines the hierarchy of the Assembly grouping. Use the Up and Down arrows on the right to change the order to your liking. Once you're done, click OK to close the window.

You will now see your assemblies populated with the appropriate grouping. To save this grouping for easy access later, click the '+' symbol, give the group an appropriate name, and click OK.

You can populate the Saved Groupings dropdown with different groupings to make switching between them fast and convenient. 

 

Adding Assemblies to your Estimate

Using Assemblies is quick and easy. Locate the assembly you'd like to use, either by drilling down through the grouping that you set, or by clicking on Find and searching for it.

Clicking on an assembly will populate the Cost Information View with the components of this assembly. Make sure that you have the 'Asm Items' widget toggled on in the Cost Information View.

Assemblies present a set a specific questions that, when answered, will fill the staging area on the right with the appropriate lines items. 

Once all questions are answered, you can verify the staged line items before clicking Add to Estimate.  

You will now have those line items in your estimate, with the quantities that you specified in your answers, and populated with the costs as per your Cost Database.

Modifying an Assembly in your Estimate

Making changes to individual line items is easy, but Estimator also enables users to make sweeping changes to an entire assembly, and have those changes automatically feed back into all the line items that were added as part of that assembly. Here's how:

First you need to set the Assembly grouping in your Estimate View. Right-click in the grouping header and select Group by Assembly.

You will now see that the Assembly group is in the grouping header, and your line items are grouped by their associated assembly. Below, you can see we have two assemblies in our estimate:

In this example, we are going to make some changes to the Interior Partition - Wood Stud Assembly. This is the important step - click on the assembly overline to populate the Cost Information View with that assembly's questions.

Now, you can make changes to an assembly by modifying your answers to the questions. In this example, we are going to extend the partition length to 400lf, and switch out the Cement Bond drywall for Mold Resistant drywall. This will give you a view of both quantities being updated, and line items being completely changed in the estimate. 

Once we have changes those answers in the Questions list, we can verify the changes to the line items in the staging area: 

Now, click Update. This will apply those changes to your estimate, replacing the necessary line items with new ones, and updating all quantities and other components affected by my new decisions. 

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