I see fairly frequently companies setting up labor costs with overheads that with careful consideration should be elsewhere in HeavyBid. Take General Liability for example. It might be based on a percentage of labor. Same for company overhead. But the test for me is this. Does the burden item in question part of the payroll process? Most likely General Liability is paid annually or biannually so it is not part of the weekly payroll run. I suggest the following when setting up labor burdens:

  1. Estimate labor costs should closely mimic the actual labor costs (Keep apples to apples).
  2. Costs paid by the company based on labor should be set up in an Indirect Biditem as a star function to calculate with each Summary and can be based on Direct labor costs or combined with Indirects. Small tools, for example, can be star function also in an Indirect Biditem. Small tools is not a payroll cost.
  3. Some companies have the burden calculation as an Addon but remember markup will not be applied to the Addon unless it is set up as an additional Addon.

Keeping bucket of costs where they occur allows a company to better analyze budgets to actual especially in the area of labor costs.