One setting that you want to set in HeavyBid is found in Tools>Preferences>System Preferences?>Setup. It is the option to “Do not prompt for material resources to be added to crews”. This should really be checked as a default setting by HCSS but easy enough to check.

What this setting does is prevent when creating a material on the fly the question coming up every time as shown below.

this gets annoying

When I see materials in a crew when training an existing user and ask why about 99% of the time the estimator did not realize that the crew hours or activity (one or the other) will be the quantity of the material. Once they understood how this feature works they admit that they misunderstood and want the material quantity independent of the crew. The estimator sees the option and believes that for some reason the material needs to be inside a crew. As a general rule permanent material should not be part of the crew.

So what is the feature for? It was originally intended for material that would be used per crew hour like small tools or maybe the activity quantity is for welding pipe and it is in inch-feet. Then the welding rod could be calculated based on the activity quantity multiplied by a #/lf of rod. Most of the time I use it for an outside truck (usually a 5 code) that I want to use inside of a crew and I want to put the number of trucks and have it multiply by crew hours. Then I have outside rental dumps (in this example three of them) running with the crew hours.

So where should material generally be inputted? It should be in the Activity codebook so when the activity is brought in the material is calculated but remains independent of the crew. This is a best practice. So check your crews and make sure if there is material in the crew that it makes sense and not just a workaround for not having an Activity codebook.