Meet ProEst: Construction Estimating in the Cloud

TROY SIMON: Good day, everyone. Thank you for attending Meet ProEst: Construction Estimating in the Cloud. Before we get started, I'm going to leave our Safe Harbor Statement up for a few seconds and remind you that anything we mentioned in this presentation may be subject to change.

All right. Now we got that out of the way. I want to thank you all for being here. My name is Troy Simon. I am the Head of Client Services for ProEst. I'm, basically, one of the delivery services managers here on the Autodesk team.

And for the most part, I've spent my entire career in the construction and real estate space, working with contractors, estimators, and the like. I would say for the last 10 or 15 years I spent the majority of that time working with estimating solutions, but along the way I did pepper in a couple of years with project management and ERP solutions to round out 2020.

I came on board with ProEst, this is pre-acquisition back in spring of 2020, to help build the professional services team. And, of course, as you all know because we're now here at Autodesk University, we were acquired at the end of 2021. And so, needless to say, I'm very excited about the future of not only ProEst but of Autodesk. And we're all so great and thrilled to be a part of this amazing organization.

So a quick look at today's agenda. I've got a couple of slides to walk through. And then we'll dive straight into ProEst and give you guys a good overview of the presentation. We won't be able to cover everything in ProEst. Don't have a lot of time today. But I think my goal is to give you just enough information to see what ProEst is all about. And we'll be sure to leave some time at the end for questions.

So I like to start off with a little story. I remember the first company I worked for selling estimating software back in 1998. And my mentor, he stood on a platform at World of Concrete. And as he started the presentation, he put his hand up to his ear to imitate holding the phone. And he'd asked the crowd this question.

He said, I'm paraphrasing here, but he'd say, so you get a phone call-- and he's talking to the contractors. You get a phone call and you hear the words, congratulations, you're a low bidder. And he asks them, what's the first thing that goes through your mind? And almost without missing a beat a guy in the audience chimed out, oh, no. What did I miss?

And I probably shared this story, I don't know, dozens if not hundreds of times over the last 20 or so years because I always thought it was-- everybody gets a chuckle out of it and it's sort of industry-wide acceptance that this is, oh, no. What did I miss? And it's natural to have a little bit of doubt creep in when we hear those words, hey, you're low bidder. Congratulations.

Because the thought, naturally, is going to cross our mind, did I leave anything out? Are all my numbers correct? Is everything accounted for? And so on. So, naturally, we go back. And we double-check the numbers to make sure that we did everything correctly. And we can feel a little bit more at ease.

Now, I'm not going to sit here today and tell you that if you are using ProEst software, you're going to eliminate all that anxiety. It's natural to have it. But, hopefully, it should lessen it substantially by using a tool like ProEst.

So Intuit did a study a while back that found that about 25% of construction firms would go out of business if they had just two or three big misses in the estimating department. So I'm not talking about you left $5,000 or $10,000 out. I'm talking about a large mistake in your estimating.

And if this is true, and I believe it is, I think it's fair to say that estimators are under a tremendous amount of pressure to get it right. I know that each of you is very aware that a construction project starts well before you break ground. And that margin that is going to be one or lost, it can evaporate long before that first excavator is moved on site.

And I'm also certain, I don't have to tell you how hard it is to make up a six- or seven-figure mistake on a project. It can be impossible to do. If a project starts in the red, many times, it's probably going to finish that way.

So let's talk about the most popular estimating program on the planet. Bet you thought I was going to say ProEst. But it is not. It's Excel. So it blows my mind a little bit, when I think of this. When I think of all the advanced technology that you and I use in our lives every day to communicate with people, to do our business processes, and we leave the fate of our estimating, our companies, if you will, to a spreadsheet.

I sometimes can't believe it. I mean, the challenge, when I talk about a program like Excel, is that it's that program that we all love to hate. I'll speak with hundreds of new customers each year at their implementation kickoff meetings. And more than half of all those clients, they all have some variation of the following statements.

They'll say, Excel is not consistent. Excel is not collaborative. Excel is error prone. It's some variation of that. Formulas can easily be manipulated. They can get changed or deleted. There's many times in a firm where you'll have multiple iterations of the same worksheet even.

So it really makes it difficult or at least really limits the process of any kind of standardization. So another stat that I found pretty interesting was from 2019. Construction technology report said that 65% of the companies are still heavily dependent on spreadsheets to manage their estimating workflow. And so my question to you today is, why? And, hopefully, we can clarify some of this up.

So meet ProEst. It's born in and built for the cloud, so no more Excel broken formulas, no more copy paste, no more multiple iterations of an Excel template, and then you add to that [INAUDIBLE] book. RS means we have a number of trade-specific databases that we can start you out with. Or, if that's not the perfect fit, we can build you your own database using your information, right?

Two, there's an integrated take-off component to ProEst that I'll show you today. It's built right in. So if you want to-- and you don't have to do this, but if you want to-- you could use that take-off software and completely eliminate double entry altogether. Three, we have custom reports. So you can build your own reports and proposals for your firm, both customer-facing and internal. Four, integrations. We have some of the most popular business management tools, things like Power BI, and we connect to many of the top project management and ERP solutions, the least of which would be our cost management and Autodesk Build.

But then there's just so much more. We have workflows, templates. I mean, it just does a tremendous amount of things in ProEst, more than we can cover in today's class. So what makes it different, though, is the data, right? It's centralized data that can be accessed from anywhere, and it can be very difficult, I should say, to get good pre-con data. It's really dependent on standardizing things and standardizing where and how you input and gather the data to begin with.

So the data has to be accurate, and ProEst really allows your team to work collaboratively so they can go from estimate right through to proposal in a single platform, right? So the data is going to be consistent from beginning to end, and it's going to be there for the next bid so you don't have to start from scratch. At a very minimum, you can crank out conceptual estimates way faster than you would using your manual methods in Excel, even if you didn't use all the horsepower that we're giving you in ProEst.

So let's see ProEst in action. All right. Let me move this out of the way here. So this is ProEst. When you first log innto ProEst, it's going to take you to a home page. And on the home page, you're going to see some widgets over here on the right-hand side of the page. On the left-hand side is going to be tasks and events. On the far left, this blue menu is going to be your navigation menu. So it's very easy to navigate ProEst to tell where you are at all times. You just cannot get lost in this program.

Now we do give you quite a bit of information right about when you start out on here. We have about 16 different widgets you can choose from, things like what are my open estimates by type? So in this instance, you can see I've got estimates in here like multifamily, commercial, I've got some schematic design estimates. In here I've got active, I've got estimates that are in review, and I'm tracking the count of each of these. I can also track in here my year-to-date wins by estimate type, so how am I doing in different sectors of the market? And how are my estimators doing, so I can start to see who's winning the bids and who is not.

Down this left-hand side, it's going to track any task and event. So we're not going to get into CRM today, but there's a CRM component to ProEst that allows you to do things like schedule phone calls and meetings and follow-ups with clients. This is going to track all of your bid due dates, so if you have a bid coming due, it'll show up on your events to-do on this page right here so you always know where it's at.

There's a calendar. It's kind of like a little miniature bid board, if you will. It's going to have all the bid due dates on here. You can look at this by company, by calendar, by department. You can arrange it by month, date, week, year. If you have more prone to like a preference of-- preferential to, like, a schedule view, you can look at things in a scheduling view. So lots of ways to get information in ProEst.

The first place I want to really start, though, is in the estimate center. Because this is where you're going to really spend the bulk of your time. This is where you're going to create estimates, where you're going to make edits to estimates, where your team is going to sort of that warehouse, right, of all of your inventory, if you will. You can notice there's filters at the top here. So I can filter say, hey, I'm looking for an estimate. I know a job, I've got hundreds of estimates in here. I know I've got to find it. It's in a negotiating stage. So I click on Negotiating, and it only-- it filters this list down to two estimates for me so I don't have to go thumbing through this long list of estimates in my estimate center.

Also in here, you can group estimates. So you can start to group estimates by type, say, and say, put all of my estimate-- my commercial together, my multifamily. Maybe you want to group things by status. So think of things like open, one, in review, things of that nature. Maybe you have multiple offices and you want to group it by office locations, right? Or even things like who the estimate is, right? The estimators on these projects, you can group it by the-- we call it owner. It's the estimate owner. This means estimator in ProEst.

You can search for an estimate. In ProEst you'll see this universal search bar. You can find-- I call it, like, the Google of ProEst. If you just start typing something in here, it'll start to find the things that start with Temp, and you'll see those estimates in there. So very fast to find what you're looking for. There's built-in filter capabilities in the estimate center as well.

So when you want to start an estimate, it's very easy. You just click on Add New Estimate and it'll pull up a setup page. Now in the setup page, we give you a lot of control in here in that you can do, really, as little or as much information as you want when you first start it. It gets to be where you can have a lot of detail in here, but to just kind of get moving in an estimate, you can just come in and say, I want to start a new estimate. And this is for Mason County Fire. And give it a name, and you'll give it a due date, and tell it what type of project you're working on. And this one I'll just say it's a commercial project. And I can hit Save and that estimate will start.

But if I want to include additional information, I can. We have things like picking cost sources. So in ProEst, we have a single database, but you can have multiple cost sources. So think of things like, I've got my price-- let's say I have four offices, right? I got an office in LA, San Francisco, New York, and Dallas. Well, my price for labor is different in Dallas than it is in San Francisco. So maybe I want to pick a labor source for Dallas. Or maybe I have things like overtime rates or prevailing wage or union rates that I have to price on this job so I could pick a labor source on this job. It's going to take my original database cost and update that labor cost to meet that labor source, right? And that's all defined up here. We do that in Setup. we're not going to show you that today.

We can also do cost sources, so things like material costs vary from location to location. So you can really do a lot with ProEst on this setup page. You can do things like include scope information. So you want to build out your scope of work here. And this all prints to proposals later on. I can tell what my inclusions are, what are my exclusions? And it's a matter of just typing these included is the following. And I can have a template on this filled out. So as I start creating bids, I don't have to type my standard text over and over and over again, I can use a template. And this will auto-populate for me.

I can also bring in things like custom fields. So if there's very specific information, design-related information that you guys like to track, or specific job information that you need to track for your firm, we allow you to create custom fields and you can track all that data, you can report on it, send it to a report or proposal for a client-facing document, et cetera.

What I want to do is I've started a job already. So let's come down here and let's look for-- let's see, Autodesk. In fact, I'll do a search. Autodesk, and I'm looking for this one right here. So I'm going to open this up by clicking on it. And the first thing I want to show you is you can notice I've loaded some drawings in here, but I want to step back just a second and show you where the drawings came from. So here in the Documents tab is where the drawings will reside. So when you first start a project, you probably come to Documents and load some drawings in here.

Now I've loaded multiple sets because I want to show you a few things, although right now, I have these sets just displaying as photos because I didn't want them to populate inside of my estimate sheet. But this is where you can load your drawings. You can give it a set number. So if you want to do a set comparison and find what are the changes as you get these sheet revisions, you can do that. It's going to log the number of pages in the drawing, the file size, the date that you uploaded those drawings, who uploaded the drawings. And you can email these things out, you can download them later. There's a lot of things you can do right here inside the drawings.

We have character recognition software that will go ahead and grab things like the page numbers and the descriptions. But if they don't automatically come in, you can actually just search for them and you can tell the software, hey, come over here and I want you to look for this description area right here and hit Save, and it'll go ahead and read that and put the description in for you. It'll do that in the pages as well.

If I want to compare drawings-- let me turn this on for a second. I'm going to make these drawings again so everything shows up here-- and I will, actually, let me come back to that. I want to get into the estimate while we have time. So let's go to Takeoff. We'll come back to Sheet Overlays for you guys. Inside of the Takeoff, I've loaded just a few items to take off because we're not going to take off a full sheet. But I do want to show you that you can do some takeoff in ProEst.

So if I zoom in, I simply just push my mouse wheel in and I can zoom in to the drawing. Most of the controls that you guys will see here work very similar to takeoff solutions you're using now. You can pan just left, right click and move the mouse, zoom in with your mouse wheel, things like that. I'm going to grab-- and I'm just going to focus in on this real small section of the plans right here-- and I'm going to take off some fencing, right? So I'm going to click on this wood fence item that I have in here, and easily, I'm just going to left-click point A, left-click point B, and when I'm done with it, I just double click. And that tells the system that I want to end that line.

So I can see I've got 51 feet there. Now, the next thing I have, I've got this little slab here that I want to put in here, this concrete pad. So I've added a slab on grade, a 6-inch lab on grade to this drawing. I'm going to click on slab area. That tells it that I want to take the slab area off. And I'm just going to left click and drag this area. It's just like I've taken off not only the slab area, but it also grabbed the perimeter. So now I've got my forms in there as well. And then lastly, all I want to do is tell it how much base do I need to put down here. I'm going to put six inches of gravel, and there it is, I'm done.

So I took off some fencing, I took off the slab area, and also, now I've got a picnic shelter here so I've got a roof here and I've got a couple of columns I want to put in. So I'm going to count some columns. So I'm going to say I got this column 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm done with that. Now, what's not in my list here is the roof. So I need to put a roof on this baby. So what I'm going to do is add a new takeoff and I'm going to just simply type in Shingle Roof. Now when I type in Shingle, you'll notice a list pops up here. This list is calling to this database that's in ProEst, and it's grabbing an item.

Now I have an assembly that's in ProEst. It's called a Shingle Roof. I'm going to grab that shingle roof by clicking on it, and you can see it loads it in right here. Now I'm going to do the same process. The first thing I want to do is take off the roof area. So I click on roof area. Again, I'm just going to left click and drag around this roof here. Whoops, let me grab it one more time, sorry. There's my roof area. And I'm going to enter in my rise-- let's say it's a 5/12 pitch, so I'm going to put in 5, 12, and I want to get my ridge length here. I'm going to click Ridge Length and I'm just going to go from here to there. There we go. I just did a quick takeoff.

Now, you might say, well, I can't really see what's underneath this. So you can adjust these areas, if you will, by clicking on the Properties box here. So if I want to make the opacity of this lighter so I could maybe see through it, I can make it a little dimmer. And now if I save that, you can see-- I can see a little bit better what's underneath it. Maybe I wanted to change the color or change the formatting of it. I can also change the color. I can change the format here. Maybe I don't want squares, maybe I want it to be on these columns. Maybe I want them to be circular or something. If it was a round column, I could change the description on that. And it would actually change for this from a square to a round column. So you can change the properties within these items.

We have all the standard takeoff tools you guys would probably want, so things like adding in notations and clouding in the drawings and adding hot links into the program. You can copy pages, copy entire pages of the drawing. Delete whole pages, you can undo what you've done. We have an auto count tool here that will automatically count symbols, so it's a symbol detection. If you want to count sinks, you could just grab a picture of the sink and it would go through the page and count all the sinks, for instance, on the page.

You can set custom scales. There's tools to do snap angles and snap to point. You can print your drawings right here. So all the standard tools you guys are used to using in your takeoff are going to be included in ProEst. So there we go. So just did a quick takeoff, took off four things. Now here's where the power really starts to amplify in ProEst. When I go back to my estimate sheet, notice what I have here. I have that 6-inch slab on grade assembly. I have the columns that I took off. I have my roofing assembly, and I've got that fencing. Now if I expand these groupings-- because I've got it grouped-- and I'll come back to that in just a second.

If I Expand All here, notice that here, I have my slab on grade, I took off about 10 items. I got three items in my columns, I got about five items in my roof. So in a matter of a few seconds, a minute at the most, I took off three assemblies, one row of fencing-- albeit a small one-- but I got about 17 to 20 items taken off and quantified instantly in ProEst. Now it's just a matter-- I've got the items in here-- what I want to do with it.

Well, let me start with the view. So we allow you to have multiple views in ProEst. So right now, you can see all this is material-related views because I have my material view turned on. If I wanted more of a standard view, like, something that has like my totals and my unit pricing and things like that, I can see things like material cost, labor cost, equipment, and then I can see my cost and then my total unit price and then my total price for this slab on grade.

Now these columns work just like you're used to. Again, like, if you're using Excel or something, I can resize them, I can move them, I can delete them altogether. I can save, like I said, multiple views. So I can come back and say, well, I really want to check out my labor. And I want to make sure that my labor is right on this. So if I go to my labor view, I can say, all right, what items do I not have labor on that I may need to factor some labor in? Well, I got the mesh, but I don't have any labor price on this. So maybe what I need to do is add some labor.

Now I can add a labor type, if I want. And if I come down here and I say, you know what, let's put a labor on this. It's going to go ahead and tell me that the cost per hour for that labor is $29 per hour. And maybe it would be better if I move this over here so it's easier to see. And then my labor productivity now, maybe I say for these roles, I can do, I don't know, 3,000 square feet in a day. And now it updates the total number of hours it's going to take me to lay out that wire mesh for that slab-- so it says you get 1.09 hours, and my labor total for that's $31. So just like that, I can go in and make quick edits to the items that I need to update my cost on.

ProEst also tells me what items I left a quantity or cost out of, and that's why this item is in this pinkish-red color here. That tells me that I'm either missing a quantity or I'm missing a cost or a missing both. In this case, I've got the quantity, I don't have the cost. So I don't have a labor cost or a material cost. Something is empty in this. So again, if I switch my view back, I'll go back to my Autodesk view here. And notice here, I don't have material. So maybe for this one, I just need a labor cost in this one, though, and I'm just going to say it's $1 a square foot to do a compaction test. That could be easily be a lump sum number, too, let's see, a subcontracted fee. In this case, I just have it down as a cost per foot on that assembly.

So that's real quickly how you can update pricing at the estimate level. Now, it doesn't really stop there, because there's a lot more detail that you can get to. You could drill into the item. And let's go down to something like, let's see, how about this asphalt paper for my roof. So notice that I've got up to five cost types on a single item, and I can have up to five different cost codes on a single item. That's very powerful when you're integrating with your ERP or project management solution. I can also, at the item level, start to apply factors.

So let's say that on this asphalt paper, I take it off in square feet, but I buy it by the roll. So let's just say in this example, there are 300 square feet in a single roll. So now it's going to tell me, I need 0.82 rolls. But notice, I need to update my cost. Because this cost is still thinking square feet. I need to say, you know what? A roll of that paper is going to cost me $50. And now I've got a better updated unit cost, and I still got to do something with material quantity. I can't buy 0.82 rolls. And you know what? I know my guys, they're going to waste 10% of it anyways. Well now, I can't buy 0.9 rolls. So what do I got to do? I got to round it up. And now I got a real true material quantity.

So ProEst can give you very detailed material quantity for those of you that need to price out exact quantities of material for your projects. It can do the same thing with labor. So at the labor line, I've got an hourly cost, and then I've got a productivity rate that it's applied to. So I can say, hey, I can do 250 square feet of this in a day. Maybe that is way too low and it should be 1,000. So now when I simply make that adjustment, it updates the number of labor hours I need or crew days if I had a crew in here, because I can, by the way, add a crew, if I have a crew working on this. So I can build crews with 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 guys working on that crew.

It's also going to allow me to track notes and here, probably most importantly, is the audit trail. Every change that I've made since I've been in this estimate has been logged right here. It tells me who made the change, what field they changed, what the old value was, and what the new value is. So again, lots and lots of detail at the item level. And guys, we haven't even gotten to the database yet. This is just inside of this estimate. Everything I'm doing only affects this estimate. Your original database stays intact for you to use on the next one.

The next thing that you probably would want to do is group items. So you've got items and they're kind of broken out here by master format, but maybe you want to look at things like maybe in a unit format way. So you could define a sort type, and you could say, hey, I want to break this one out and say buy foundations, roofing, and site improvements, just as an example. So back in the estimate sheet, I can take those sort types and apply them to all these items. And now, I'm able to sort by it and report on it. So again, one more time, I'm going to come right through here. And notice I've got foundations applied to this one. I've got wood columns, I've got some site improvement here, but my roofing-- I want to go ahead and apply my roofing, sort type two, and then down here I've got some site improvement for that wood fence.

So now, if I group this by-- instead of assembly, I can group it by my unit format codes-- and now I've got foundations, roofing, and site improvements. And now I'm broken out in unit format. So just tons and tons of flexibility for you guys to use ProEst in the manner that you guys want to use it. And we're not trying to change, necessarily, the way you do estimating, just make you faster and more accurate along the way.

All right. What we haven't touched on is profit, and we would probably like to make some. So let's look at Summary real quick. In the summary, we can add as many markups as we want. We can also have predefined markups. So when I start a job, I'm able-- inside of my system settings-- to define. When I start a commercial project, I want this set of markups to apply. But if I start an education project, or a health care project, maybe I have different markups. Maybe I have more or less markups that I need to apply for certain projects. This way I don't have to create this screen every time. I can start the project, tell what type it is, it's going to go straight here.

Now we have single cost-type markups, like, where maybe you just want to markup material, right? So to take up things like sales tax or labor to account for things like burden. Here, down below, these are more summary in nature. And these markups can be filtered. So think of things like overhead, fee, design fees, and bonding, just kind of like the bare minimum stuff. We allow you to mark items up four different ways. You can use a straight markup-- think of a percentage-- you can do a margin, which is going to give you a more accurate true percentage rate amount, because it's taken in the cost and the markup.

You're going to get a lump sum amount, so maybe you just want to put a flat fee to something. You can do that right here. So maybe you want to say, I really want this design fee to be $1,800. So it changes my total, changes-- updates my total estimate. And then lastly, maybe something like a bond where I want to define levels. So we can put a bond calculator in here and say for the first $50,000, do this, for the next $150,000, do that. Up to $10 million, up to $100 million, up to $1 billion. Like, you can build this bond calculator out as deep as you would like, and it'll auto calculate what your markup should be for bond on that project.

In this case, I'm at $190 for this $27,000 project, based on the numbers I put in. But again, lots of power here. You can filter. Maybe you only want certain markups to apply to certain items or divisions or phases. For instance, maybe I only want my fee in this example to impact, for whatever reason, a certain division or phase. I could do that by putting the filter on it here, and it would make that adjustment change there. All right, so I've shown you a lot. I want to kind of wrap this up with two more sections. I want to touch on the database, and then lastly on reports, and show you guys a few reports.

So the database like I said at the start, is really what drives ProEst. It's the power behind this product, and it gives you a lot of flexibility and a lot of-- I hate to reuse the word power, but it's going to give you that confidence you're going to want as you start creating more bids and knowing that this historical data that you're tracking is up to date. So we have things like items. So you can create, again, like single-line items, and I touched on the item section inside the actual estimate when I drilled into the item level.

You'll notice this looks the exact same, so I can have up to five cost types, up to five cost codes. I can factor in productivity rates for equipment, labor, and material. I can add crews to items, define sort types so they're defaulted. I got a complete audit trail of changes that I make to an item from the beginning of time. So as soon as you start building your database, this audit trail is going to start tracking at the item level in your database forever. And it'll track every change that was ever made to that item so you always go back and restore to a point that you may need. And you can install default notes on a single item as well.

The next thing is assemblies. Now we give you several dozen pre-configured assemblies when you turn on ProEst. No matter which database of ours you start with, you get pre-configured assemblies. So think of things like slab on grade, continuous footings, spread footings, interior walls, things like that. And inside of the assembly, we build items, and then we build formulas to calculate those items. It's very simple. We walk you through this process. Our implementation team makes it very, very easy for you to add these items and build your own assemblies. And you can make them as simple or as complex, really, as you want to.

We also make it very easy to update pricing. So let's go to, like, something like-- let's look at that mesh item that we looked at earlier. So if I just type in mesh, I can go through here and it's going to find every piece of wire mesh I have on my database. So I'm able to update the cost of that item. This is my default cost, but remember earlier I talked about different offices having different costs? So if, for instance, my wire mesh was $0.45 a square foot as default, maybe in Chicago I know that's $0.50. When I go to San Francisco, I'm going to pay $0.55. In New York, I'm really going to pay higher, So it's $0.75, but down in Miami, I may be back down to my normal $0.45.

Now any place that you don't have an additional cost-- so if this is my default cost here-- if these are blank and I start an estimate that's in New York and I don't have a cost in New York, it's going to automatically use my default cost. So don't think you're going to have 0 in there. This just allows you to put different costs at the different locales that you may be working in. You can filter this by division, by subdivision, or cost type. So you can really break this and filter this out to make database updates very easy.

You can also-- there's an import-export tool. So I can export my data. I could then update the spreadsheet and then import it right back in, right? So you could think about sending things out to a supplier and updating costs. Do it internally, with a junior estimator just updating the pricing and then having a senior review it and load it back in. All kinds of ways you can really make sure that you have up-to-date data at all times.

And then I, of course, I already touched on the cost sources. That's what this last button is here. All right. Now, final section is going to be reports. Out of the box, you're going to get probably 25 to 30 just standard reports that you get, things like overview reports, material reports, take-off reports, scope of work reports. I mean, we're going to give you just a bunch of standardized reports out of ProEst. But we also gave you the ability to build your own reports. So I wanted to show you a-- let's take a look here and see a cost summary report.

And this is one that I just kind of built on the fly here and actually, just not that long ago. But I want to kind of drill in here and show you guys so you can make these as general-- you can see here that I just group things up in unit format and got myself just a unit cost. What's it costing me for this project? I've got $17,966 in it. And then down below, I went ahead, included a summary review of all of my markups. So my flat 8 and 1/2% on material, my labor and things of that nature. And then that subtotals up to $22,000. Then I keep going further down and I've got my overhead and my fee and my design fees and my bond.

And then-- so this gives me sort of my overall picture. But then maybe what I'm really looking for is a more master format, if you will, report that gives me more detail. And this breaks it out by subdivision. So I can start to see, by subdivision, what do I have in each section of my bid? So I can get as little amount-- a little detail or as much as I want out of this. We have things like comparison reports. So think of it as-- Let me pull this over for a second. Think of it as like, I want to compare-- maybe I want to get, like, two estimates. So let's look at an Estimate Comparison Report. And this will separate a V1 versus a V2 estimate.

And I can see that in Version 1, I had $24,000. In version 2, I had $28,000. I've got a roughly $4,000 variance and a percentage difference of 16%. Or, you can look at maybe a little bit more detail, and I've got a variance by subdivision. Again, same type of report, but just slightly different view. And it's going to give me these percentages at the item level, or at the subdivision level, I should say. So what's my forming? Well, I've got a 16% variance in forming. I've got a-- or negative 60%. I've got a $77 variance here in this one. So it's really starts to tell me the differences of both dollars and percentages of those variants in those different reports.

So you really get a lot of flexibility, if you will, in how you guys want to look at reports, how you want to report on your projects, and really get the power out of ProEst. So we can just design really almost any report that you guys want. And if we can't design it in ProEst, a lot of this data we can send to Power BI. And now we can start talking about building dashboards and things of that nature.

So in conclusion, so I want to thank you all for attending this session. I hope you learned a lot today, and look forward to seeing you next time.