Rave's Estimate Categories & Sub-categories

Rave Financial gives you powerful tools to organise your project costs, making it easy to track and report on where money is being spent. 

Categories and sub-categories are the backbone of this system, ensuring your budgets, quotes, and invoices are structured and clear. Rave's Estimate Sub-categories allows a much more detailed view of your cost vs spending, to ensure no over or under spend goes unnoticed. 

Each Category can be assigned a sub-category to give users further detail to where their spend is going. Subcategories are not compulsory, so if you do not need this level of detail, you can skip this step entirely and continue using Rave at a Category level only *Sliding off the subcategory tab in your Branch Settings under Categories*.  

We have reporting in Rave back costing at a Category level as well as Sub-Category now.  See link here for your Back Costing Report showing Categories and Sub Categories.

What are Categories?

• Categories are the main groupings of your project costs.

• They represent the high-level areas of spend across a project.

• Examples: Preliminary & General, Foundations, Drainage, Framing, Roofing, Fixtures, Labour, Site Costs.

Categories make it easier to:

• Organise your budget in logical sections.

• Run accurate reports.

• Give clients a clear overview of project costs.

What are Sub-Categories?

• Sub-Categories sit underneath categories and allow you to break down costs in more detail.

• They are optional but highly recommended for accurate cost tracking.

• Examples (under “Preliminary & General”): Builders Risk Insurance, Health & Safety, Skip Bins, Builders Site Toilet, Builders Guarantee Costs, Builders Temp Power etc

Sub-categories make it easier to:

• Record detailed supplier quotes.

• Manage PC Sums and Provisional Sums.

• Track overruns or savings within a particular scope of work.

How Categories and Sub-Categories Work Together

Think of them like a filing system:

• Category = Folder

• Sub-Category = Documents inside the folder

This two-level structure means you can keep information neat and reportable without over-complicating your budget.

Adding, Editing and Deleting Categories

Those with permission will find the Branch Settings - Estimate Categories tab via their profile dropdown. 

You will either have No permission, View only or full Add/Edit/Delete.

By deleting a subcategory and/or a category you do run the risk of projects who have used that data becoming broken. We highly suggest not deleting categories. We will be updating this field further to allow merging and archiving of categories to prevent data corruption very soon. We will update this article when this feature is complete. 

Uploading via a CSV

Users have the ability to upload or download their Category and Sub-categories via CSV.

To upload your Estimate Categories Column A will be where you enter your Category name, while Column B will be where you enter your Sub-Category. If you have multiple Sub-Categories under one Category, you will enter them on one line in column B using a comma to separate them. You can also have one Sub-Category per Category or just a Category with no Sub-Category.