MB Elite - Expert's Corner - Efficiency Drive
Masterbill Elite
Expert's Corner
Efficiency Drive
Are you using the system as efficiently as possible?
A number of recent support calls have left us wanting to ensure all users are aware of the following recommendations for working efficiently when editing and pricing a Bill.
Editing a Bill
Users are advised to make a Bill for the section(s) of the Bill they are currently editing thus reducing the need to regenerate a complete Bill every time they wish to check that amendments have been incorporated.
We have recently seen a user refreshing a 190 page bill every time they amended a dimsheet within the Substructure Element, by advising them to create another Bill and set it to include only those items measured against the Substructure Element we found that this reduced the Bill to just 9 pages and hence refresh times were dramatically reduced.
Users may wish to make an ‘Editing’ Bill the properties of which can be adjusted to whichever section of the Bill they are currently editing and removing the need to create numerous ‘mini’ Bills in order to carry out editing.
Remember: The items may be edited from these smaller Bills but as soon as your Full Bill is refreshed all changes will be incorporated.
Pricing a Bill
User often ask how they can avoid pricing all items in a Parts, Elements & Workgroup Bill especially as some items appear several times as they are in each Part.
We recommend that the user created a new Workgroup Bill with the same Parts, Elements and Workgroups selected – this will ensure all like items are combined and will make the Bill much shorter. The user should then price this shorter Bill.
Once pricing has been completed the user should return to the original Parts, Elements and Workgroups Bill and ‘Match Prices’ back to the priced Workgroup Bill – this will transfer prices to all occurrences of the items in the original Bill and save the user pricing the larger document.
Note: It is not possible to change the sequence of the Original Bill to Workgroups and then change it back to Parts, Elements and Workgroups as prices are saved against the particular sequence to avoid error occurring when users seek to combine Parts etc.
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