Cost codes: setting up your structure
The filing system every other number hangs off
Why this one matters
Cost codes are the least exciting decision in estimating and the one that decides whether your numbers are worth anything in two years. Get them consistent and you can say what a slab costs you across eleven jobs. Let every estimator invent their own and you have eleven jobs you cannot compare.
It is worth two minutes before you price anything, because it is painful to change later and free to get right now.
What you will see
- A structure built from the trades you actually use, not a template someone else wrote
- Codes that carry across to the next job rather than being rebuilt each time
- Where the money lands once a code exists, and what that gives you later
What was said
The narration, word for word, for anyone who would rather read it than watch it — or who is on a train.
Cost codes are the shape of your estimate. Every item sits in one, and every order, invoice and claim is reported against them.
Add a cost code with a code, a name, and a parent if it sits underneath another.
Number them with gaps — ten, twenty, thirty — so there's room to add one later without renumbering everything.
The keyboard is quicker for a long tree. Insert adds a cost code beside the one you've selected. Shift and Insert adds one inside it.
If a trade doesn't apply to this job, don't delete it. Set its status to Not Required in the bill of quantities: it stays in the structure, and counts as zero in the totals.
Once the job is running, the W-B-S page turns the same structure into a live cost report: the budget, what's ordered, what's been spent, and the variance on each cost code.
Here, the swimming pool had no budget at all, and it's pulled the whole stage into the red. A cost code nobody budgeted for is the usual reason.
Build a structure you like once, then start every new estimate from it as a template.
Doing it, rather than watching it
This page is the tour. When you are in SmarteBuild with a job open and need the detail — every option, every exception, the things the video had no time for — the help centre has the full article.
Building your structure — the full reference
Read about it instead: Cost Codes & WBS · Bill of Quantities · Reports
Start with one job and see
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