RAVE’s financial management system is designed to help you manage all the financial aspects of your projects including budgeting, bills, and invoices with ease.
 



Accessing your Project’s Budget Workflows


You can access your Project’s financial workflows from either the Financial button, or the Site|Build button's Build Project list, clicking on the project’s job number, and finally the Budget sub-tab. 

 

 

This will display the project’s Financial Management Systems workflows – all laid out in an easy and logical order, starting with: 

  • Creating a preliminary budget
  • Sending your quote and tender requests out 
  • Managing your quotes and tenders received in
  • Building up a full client estimate or proposal
  • Creating purchase orders - if you use them
  • Receiving bills in
  • And sending client invoices out 

Plus a suite of powerful, real-time, project reports including

  • Project Back Costing Reports
  • Profitability Reports - displaying expected and real-time gross profit reports
  • Cost Center Report - to see if you are over or under budget by your cost centers (chart of accounts)
  • Charge Up Report 
  • Transaction Report




Full training tutorials and FAQ walkthroughs of each workflow will soon be available via our RAVE Help portal, and we'll dive deeper into the Preliminary Budget workflow in a few moments.  But first, if you ever need to go back to the project's non-financial sub-tabs, you can do so by clicking on the overview sub-tab to the very left of the screen.




The Quotes sub-tab

This is where we manage our quotes or raw costs (pricing excluding any margin). You will find all you need here to add pricing, edit existing pricing, add a margin for charge-up jobs, add a scope of works for clients or contractors, and much more. Let’s dive into how to ceate a quote first.



Create a Quote from a Supplier’s emailed submission

 

To manually load a quote into RAVE, that a supplier has emailed back to you:

  1. We again, return to the ‘Quote Request’ sub-tab, and click on the 3 dot action dropdown to right of your original quote request 
  2. Then click on ‘Copy to Quote’
    That will take your quote request number (QR reference number) and associate it to a new quote tender number (QT reference number) – they have the same RAVE project ID number followed by a version number i.e. -1, -2, -3 etc.

    TIP: We recommend changing the QT reference number to a description, to make it more visible to you on the back costing page i.e. if it's a builder, you can type in ‘Building Labor’, and follow that up with the suppliers quote number if you want to. 
  3. Then upload their quote via the ‘Attachments’ section – by clicking on the cloud icon to open your file browser
  4. Type in, or copy and paste, their scope of works 
  5. Type in, or copy and paste, their Inclusions & Exclusions
  6. If you’ve loaded an inventory list, you can click on either ‘Add a line item’ buttons, and start typing in your inventory item code to pre-populate the item details
  7. You can assign the line item to a specific category by
  • Setting the Unit of Measure and Quantity
  • And the Markup or Sell Price – these work
     in conjunction with each other i.e.
    - if you type in a set sell price, RAVE will calculate the markup
    - if you type in the markup, RAVE will calculate the sell price



Note: If you leave the line item markup blank, it will set the sell price to the cost price on this page, but you can still add an entire project-level markup when creating your proposal via the Estimates sub-tab.
 


   
NOTE: If you are running a ‘Charge Up’ job, you must enter in either a markup percentage or a fixed sell price in order to then move on to charge up. 


 


Multiple Scope of Works and Categories

 

Because we have two different categories in this example, we can come back up to the Scope of Works ‘Assigned Category’ dropdown and assign a different scope of works to each of the Scope of Works ‘Frame and Truss’ or the ‘Framing Materials’ portions of the quote.  You can then add another Scope of Works to the other portion of the quote by clicking on the ‘Add another scope of works’ button.

 

Using the category as a guide, RAVE will position the scope of works below the line items it relates to – or if you have just one category, all of your scope of work details appear at the bottom of all of the line items.
 

 


Multiple Inclusions and exclusions
 

All Inclusions and Exclusions are managed in the same ‘Inclusions and Exclusions’ section.  You just need to list each item in the order they are to appear in your proposal document.  And again, you can use the formatting buttons as required to get these details looking right, and to highlight specific points.


 




Saving your Quote options

You can save this quote as pending, saving your quote as it is now, to continue editing it, or to move on to another quote - ensuring that your work is saved. You can also save it as a template.

 

 

Approving your Quotes
 
On the right-hand side, you have the option to ‘Approve & Add to Estimate’ or to just ‘Approve’.

  • Clicking ‘Approve & Add to Estimate’ will add your quote to the client ‘Estimate’ page, and also to the ‘Back Costing’ sub-tab.
  • While selecting ‘Approve’ will bypass adding your quote to the client ‘Estimate’ page, and add it to the ‘Back Costing’ sub-tab only.  


Clicking on ‘Approve & Add to Estimate’ will automatically create a new client ‘Estimate’ version.  And then, clicking ‘Add to Estimate’ will automatically take you to the estimate page.  If you have more than one version you would then select which estimate to add the quote too.

 



 

 




> Next up is our Financial Management System client 'Estimate' sub-tab article