There may be instances where you include a negative fee in your fee table, such as a discount, and you want to distribute its value back into your estimate.
However, if you have line items in your estimate with negative costs, understanding how negative fees react with these line items can be tricky. This article offers an overview of how these calculations function in Estimator.
Negative Fees on Positive Cost Line Items
Consider the following estimate, and refer to the aggregate cost column, as well as the burdened total cost column:
Now, consider the following fee table:
Finally, here are the results of the estimate once the negative fee is distributed:
As you can see, the burdened total for each reduces itself by 10%. At face value, the backend math is taking the aggregate cost of each line item, and reducing it by 10%. This math is simple when every line item in the estimate is positive.
Negative Fees on Negative Cost Line Items
Now, let's consider a different scenario where you have an item in your estimate with a negative value:
In this example, I left the fee table percentage as it was in the previous example:
The important difference here, is that with the negative line item contributing to our direct cost, the discount is significantly smaller.
If you refer to the estimate view previously shown, it is discounting the positive line items, but it is actually adding dollars to the negative line item.
A Negative line item multiplied by a negative fee, pushes the burdened total closer to 0 on the number line, rather than further from it.
The distribution calculation operates on a per-item basis, evaluating each item's percentage contribution to the overall direct cost. For example:
Direct cost = $20,000
Modular Brick = -$40,000
-$40,000/$20,000 = -200%
Therefore, if you apply a -200% multiplier to the existing fee total of -$2,000 shown in the fee table, you are left with positive $4000, which contributes itself to the item.
The math described above is how fee distributions work across the Estimator platform. Just be aware that when you comingle positively and negatively costed items, the resulting math can be trickier to parse.