This article gives you the best practice to ensure your indirect item costs are captured in Field Link to track your actual costs against your estimated costs.
Why Follow This Best Practice?
In Estimating Link®, an Indirect Item spreads indirect costs to primary bid items, thereby increasing the direct cost of the items. It adds a bottom line cost to the item but does not allocate any specific resources to that item.
In Field Link, resource costs must be housed in a primary bid item or sub-item to track on a timesheet. Therefore, you must transfer your Indirect Cost Item to a primary bid item on the Estimating Link project before submitting to Field Link.
Step-by-Step Instructions
In Estimating Link, make a copy of the project you want to send to Field Link.
- In the copied project, un-post the indirect item.
- Add a new primary bid item to the bid sheet for your indirect costs. (For example, the bid item can be Qty 1, U/M is LS, and the description of the item is "Indirect Costs.")
- In the Item Sheet, go to the Services Menu and select Copy Item.
- Select the INDIRECT Item.
- Copy the contents from the Indirect Item (Source Item) to the newly created bid item (Target Item).
- Send the copied project to Field Link.
Your field staff will now be able to see the indirect item costs in Field Link and track their actual costs against them.
Demonstration Tutorial (4 min)
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