This article demonstrates how to use Multiple-Price ancillaries
Setup
1. Firstly, open up the ancillary editor in Settings>Ancillary Questions and locate your ancillary file.
2. Now that you have the ancillary editor open, you can create the different costing groups, by Clicking Add Cost Group
3. Here you can add as many or as few cost groups as you like, you can have a single group called Labour, or for more in-depth reporting, you may wish to have ‘Plumbers Labour’, ‘Electricians Labour’. Similarly, you may wish to have a group called Products, or you may want to split this into ‘Building Materials’, ‘Electrical Materials’ etc…
The various costing groups have now been created and each ancillary question can have one or more of these groups assigned against it. Below is an example of usage.
Example Scenario
Double sockets cost £10 each and take the electrician 15 minutes to fit, in addition to 1 hour to run the wiring around the conservatory and connect up to the consumer unit. The electrician charges £50 labour per hour.
1. Create the Double Socket question in the Electrics group
2. In the prices tab, we set the Variable cost to £10, the multiplier to User Specified Count and the Cost group to Electrical Materials. This is going to multiply the number of sockets entered by the salesman by £10, to obtain the total cost of the sockets.
3. Click Add Cost, to add another costing element to this ancillary question. You will see an additional tab has appeared
4. In this tab, set the Fixed price to £50, Variable Price to £12.50 and Cost group to Electricians Labour. The £50 fixed cost is the 1 hour to connect up the wiring and run around the conservatory and the £12.50 is the £50 hourly rate, divided by 4, because each socket takes 1/4 of an hour to fit.
The setup of this question is now complete.
When answering this question with ‘7’ double sockets, we should see a price of:
Materials
7 x double sockets @ £10 per socket = £70
Labour
1 hour to run the wiring @ £50 flat rate = £50 + 7x fitting cost @ 12.50 per socket = £87.50
Total
£207.50
Reporting – breakdown view and consolidated view
1. In the Printing tab, right-click on the Conservatory Ancillaries report in the Pricing report folder, then click Properties.
2. Tick or un-tick ‘Show ancillary cost breakdown (if licensed)’ as required.
3. Depending on the option selected in the step above, your ancillary report will either look like this:
or this (requires Price Setup License):
