A labour engine that reads the building rather than asking you to re-type it. Square feet under roof, opening counts, garage-door installs, eave height and wainscot come off the estimate; the rates and the crew are yours. It runs in three modes — a per-square-foot shop bid, a crew-hours build-up, or a flat number you type — and every mode produces named lines that add to a total you can see.
Also called: labor cost · how much to charge for erecting · crew hours · labour pricing
Labour is priced off the building's geometry, not off the top of your head
Square feet under roof, walk doors and windows, overhead doors, eave height, wainscot and lean-tos are read off the design; the crew, the wage and the productivity rate are yours. Each becomes a named line with its own hours instead of one figure you have to defend three weeks later. Overhead door install — four hours a door — is the line that goes missing when labour is a single cell in a spreadsheet.
Crew size × hours × burdened wage, not a per-foot rate from three years ago
Set the crew, the hourly wage, the burden percentage, the hours in a day and the square feet a crew gets done in one, and the calculator answers what the job costs to build. Tall walls stretch it by 15%; house wrap, soffits and wainscot each add their own fraction of a day. When wages move you change one field, rather than re-deriving a per-foot number that hides both the wage and how fast your crew actually goes.
Add a porch and the labour follows it
One job gained two enclosed attached buildings and porches after labour was saved, and kept billing 3,300 square feet against a real under-roof total of 4,090 — 790 feet of crew time nobody charged for. Measurements are re-read off the current building every time the estimate opens, while the things a person decided — the crew, the wage, a flat bid, a typed offset — stay exactly as entered. A design saved before its pricing was ever opened used to store zero square feet and price labour at nothing, permanently.
The wraparound porch corner gets framed and paid for
Adding up porch legs undercounts a wraparound, because the shared corner belongs to both legs — 240 square feet by the leg sum where the real figure is 340. Confirm the higher number once and it drives the customer's porch line and the labour calculation together. A hundred square feet of roof framed for free on every wraparound is not a rounding error.
Take the flat bid when you have one, and give the crane day a name
An erector who quotes the whole shell at one price has no use for a crew calculator, so a single number replaces it outright. Anything the formula has no line for — a crane day, a site you can only reach from one side — becomes its own named line with an amount, instead of being fudged into the rate where the next person can't find it.
- 1Geometry is derived from the estimate: sqft under roof = main building + enclosed attached buildings + every open porch or lean-to.
- 2Garage doors bill at their own rate and are subtracted from the total opening count so the same door isn't charged twice.
- 3Option toggles (house wrap, soffits, tall walls, wainscot, insulation) add their own lines or lift the rate.
- 4Custom labour line items can be added by hand with a label, an amount and an explanation.
- 5The whole blob — inputs, toggles, custom items, manual override, porch override — saves to job_meta.labor, debounced, so it follows the job across devices and users.
Labour was recomputed from the building on every load and never stored, so a rep who typed in a corrected square footage or ticked a wainscot box lost it the moment they navigated away. Saving it exposed the next problem: the recompute overwrote the builder's saved figure on the following load, and the job quietly reverted to the geometry's number. A saved override now wins, and it is claimed the instant the edit is made, so a recompute arriving mid-keystroke cannot clobber a fresh one.
- Labour priced from memory instead of from the building
- Hand-entered labour lost on refresh or invisible to the other person in the office
- Openings and garage doors double-counted
See it on your own jobs
Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.
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