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 then 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 (tender) requests out
- Managing your quotes and tenders received in
- Building up a full client estimate or proposal
- Creating purchase orders
- Receiving bills in
- And sending client invoices out
Plus a suite of powerful, real-time, project reports including
- Back Costing Report - Allowing you to view your prelim budget and or quotes vs the PO and Bill totals to check for over and under spends.
- Profitability Report - Allowing you to review at a high level, your actual vs expected profit and your budget over and underspends without too much detail.
- Cost Centre Report - Allowing you to view all your pricing you load into Rave to ensure the chart of account codes are correct and in turn when you start billing, making sure the bills have the correct code.
- Charge Up Report - Allowing Charge Up Clients to provide their Client a running total of what they estimated by category vs what they have invoiced. This is the charge up version of the settlement statement.
- Transaction Reports - Allowing you to review all Bills and Credit Notes at a Project and Branch Level so you see by supplier/code/description how many of what items you purchased, the pricing and volume.
The Estimate sub-tab
This is where we have multiple options to add/review markup and margin, edit a welcome message, add attachments, manage variations, and send clients proposals to accept or reject. There are a few options on this page so we will go through them one by one to explain how each works.
The Estimate Overview
The Estimate Overview is the first section at the top of the Estimate Sub-Tab, this is where we summarise our profit adjustments, and finalise our overall project pricing to send to a client. We'll go through this section in detail shortly.
The Estimate Version
Below the Estimate Overview is the Estimate Version section - you can quickly duplicate the default estimate version that RAVE generates, to create an alternate version to test out alternative pricing or scope of works. When working on your pricing on this page - the Estimate version selected here, dictates what pricing proposal you are working on.
Client Acceptance History
The Client Acceptance History shows the Acceptance History of the Proposals sent. It will show when a Client accepts or declines a proposal, the date and time it was accepted/declined, lasted viewed, status, the date/time the action took place, who actioned it and also if the client put in a message.
The Markup & Margin section
Below the Estimate Version is the Estimate Version's Markup & Margin section - where we can tweak (or view only) the margin and markup for the Estimate Version we are working on. The version markup is added to your line item markup to reach your desired profit margin.
The Quotes section
Below the Estimate Version Markup & Margin is where your Estimate Quotes sit. These are the quotes that make up your Client Estimate.
The Estimate Overview
The client’s ‘Estimate Overview’ screen provides a lot of pricing information at this project level, so let’s break it down.
Fixed Sell Profit / Fixed Sell Price tick boxes
You have the option of a fixed % or $ profit, or a fixed sale price at the project level.
If we had an item with a line item markup of 10% and a cost price of $1000 + gst (you will only make 9.09% margin or $100 on this job) - if this line item markup doesn’t seem enough you can click into the Profit adjustment box and change this markup by a % or $ amount to be whatever you wish i.e. 15%. Rave will now re calculate the original 10% line item markup plus the adjustment required to achieve an overall margin of 15% or $176.47 profit
If you think $176.47 isn't quite enough, and you want to change the client to a fixed dollar amount of say $1,500, you can click ‘Fixed Sell Price’ and set the dollar value. RAVE will then take the original 10% markup, and calculate the extra it needs to get to a fixed price of $1500.
The little question marks in the images below give you an indication of what each of these headings are.
- Line Item Markup - refers to the total markup at the quote line item level
- Active Version Markup - refers to the estimate version markup given this selected Estimate version ONLY
- Project Markup - is the total markup across the entire project, either as a fixed sell amount or a profit %.
NOTE: You can select any one, or have a combination of all 3 of these Markup options.
Creating a new Estimate Version
You can have multiple versions of a single quote - each with a different markup using the duplicate button.
Things can quickly change when you present a quote to your client. They don't want linea now, they want brick. Instead of having to restart the quote again, RAVE allows you to duplicate the entire version, remove the linea, add brick and present the new Estimate version, while still keeping the first option for the client.
Once you present your first version, email or download and print it, you have the option to ‘Duplicate’ it via the 3 dot action button. A pop-up box will appear asking you to confirm that you do want to duplicate the estimate.
Rave will now duplicate all quotes from your original estimate with the word COPY added to the end. You now have the ability to edit the duplicated version - remove/add pricing, change product qty’s, and make other changes.
Back on the Quotes page, you will find that the original version quotes are locked and cannot be changed - but the duplicated quotes are unlocked and are able to be removed or added to.
The version of the job that you're currently looking at is your ‘active’ version. To switch back to Version 1, just click the circle beside the estimate version, and confirm that you want to switch back. The ‘Is Active’ tag will show you which estimate version you are currently ‘viewing and working on’.
In this specific job, Deer 202787-01 there is one quote from the builder that's broken down into two categories - the Framing Materials, and the Frame and Truss. There are two different scopes sitting underneath it, along with any inclusions & exclusions.
- You can add another quote to this job from someone else by clicking the ‘Add a Quote’ button - this will take you back to the quotes page.
'Manage attachments' allows you to add PDFs, plans, or anything you want here as long as its in PDF format. The order you add these in is how RAVE will append them to the client’s estimate/project.
You have the ability to add a personal message and/or a scope of works to the top of the estimate proposal (PDF), and as a welcome message to the body of the email i.e. ‘Dear Derek, thank you for your time working with us to price your job. We hope you find this estimate to be satisfactory.’
2. Or, if you are ready to present this estimate to your client, you can head to the top of this page, and click the ‘Generate Proposal’ button on the right-hand side - as per the image below.
On the left-hand side of the Generate Proposal page, you’ll see a preview of your Estimate Proposal. Your welcome message (and/or scope of work) is displayed above your first category i.e. Framing Materials. Each scope (if included) is added below each category header.
To the right are your Proposal Options – allowing you to change the layout and detail of your proposal, and preview your changes. Here you can:
- Choose the option of creating an Estimate or a Quote
- Set the number of working days your proposal is valid for – positioned below your logo to the top right
- Change the proposal style – a number of different proposal layouts depending on the amount of detail you want to share, these are:
- Minimal - Line Items (with Qty, UOM, Unit Price and Total)
- Minimal without Prices - displays the Total Project Price only
- Simple - displays the Category Name with Total Project Price only
- Simple with Prices - displays the Category Name with Category Total, and Total Project Price
- Streamlined - displays the Category Totals and Line Items (with totals only)
- Streamlined No Pricing Lines - displays the Category Totals only i.e. hides pricing lines from the proposal
- Detailed - displays the Category Totals, Category Names, Line Items (with UOM, Qty, and Total), and Total Project Price
- Full - displays the Category Totals, Category Names, Line Items (with UOM, Qty, and Unit Price), and Total Project Price - Include Inclusions & Exclusions – displayed immediately below the Total Cost section
- Include Scope of Works – located below each section’s Category Header
- Show Markup Breakdown – located below the Total Cost (inc GST & Markup)
- Show Markup % on Items – displayed on each inventory line entry
- Show Raw Cost Pricing - displays the raw cost pricing on the proposal (This is showing your costings to your client)
- Show Client Project Contingency – appearing as a % with a total cost including contingency, below the total cost amount
As you can see, the Markup Breakdown tells the client that this entire project has a 10% markup.
If you want to show an individual markup on line items you have the option to display this to the clients. As an example, here the Framing Material has 10% markup and the Frame and Truss has an 26% markup. You can display the individual markup alongside each item instead of an overall markup at the bottom.
If you do not want to send the proposal to your client just yet, click the ‘Generate the Proposal’ option, which will save a copy of your proposal in the files section of your project in RAVE - accessible via ‘Site/Build, your project number, Files then Generated Estimate Proposals or via your project number/Files.
Your Estimate Proposals file will stay stored there until you (or your team) Replace it with a new one. Every time you send or generate a proposal, RAVE will save it for you and store it here - so you don’t have to worry that you might lose these files. We will also check the latest version box if you update that proposal and re download or send it to the client with changes.
Sending proposals to clients
For information on how to send a proposal to clients, check out our Sending Proposals to Clients article.