It reads the building instead of asking you to retype it. Square feet under roof, opening counts, overhead doors, eave height, wainscot and porches all come off the estimate. The rates and the crew are yours. On a SmartBuild-priced estimate the Labor Calculator prices the shell per square foot, adds walk doors, windows and overhead doors at their own rates, lifts for house wrap, soffits, tall walls and wainscot, and takes named custom lines — or one manual labour figure in place of all of it. On an estimate built in Leads 2 Build you can also price it as a crew-hours build-up: crew size, wage, burden and how much your crew gets done in a day. Either way every line is named and adds up to a total you can see. Post-frame and barndominiums, nobody else — which is why it already knows what a fourteen-foot eave and a wraparound porch do to a crew's week.
Also called: labor cost · how much to charge for erecting · crew hours · labour pricing
Labour is priced off the building, not off the top of your head
Square feet under roof, walk doors and windows, overhead doors, eave height, wainscot and lean-tos are read off the building you drew. The crew, the wage and the productivity rate are yours. On an estimate built in Leads 2 Build each one becomes a named line with its own hours, instead of one figure you have to defend three weeks later. Overhead door install — four hours a door — is the line that goes missing when labour is a single cell in a spreadsheet.
Labour gets priced off the last barn that looked about the same, and the two overhead doors — four hours apiece to hang — never make it onto the sheet at all.
A rep stands behind a number he can explain line by line. Labour sits in the same breakdown as materials and services instead of a spreadsheet nobody else can open, so a line you disagree with gets edited rather than the whole figure re-derived — and the doors never go missing again.
Crew size times hours times burdened wage, not a per-foot rate from three years ago
On an estimate built in Leads 2 Build, set the crew, the hourly wage, the burden, the hours in a day and how many square feet your crew gets done in one. It starts at four men, $28 an hour, 35% burden and 550 square feet a crew-day — a loaded rate of $37.80 an hour — and every one of those five fields is yours to change. When wages move you change one field, instead of re-deriving a per-foot number that hides both the wage and how fast your crew actually goes.
The wage went up in the spring and the per-foot rate on the price sheet did not, so every quote since has been shipping a thinner margin than the one you think you are making.
An owner who can see the wage inside the price knows when the price has gone stale. Cost and price stay two separate questions, and every labour line prints the hours and the loaded rate behind it, so the total can be walked backwards for whoever is asking. What the crew actually takes home is a separate ladder, set out on day rates with shared surplus.
The overhead door is billed once, and billed as an overhead door
The design hands over a total opening count with the overhead doors already inside it. They are subtracted before either line is priced, so a 14-foot overhead is charged once — four hours, or $500 on the per-foot sheet — and never again at the hour and a half a walk door gets.
Eight openings on the sheet, two of them the overheads, and the calculator bills eight walk-door installs — a full crew day of hanging doors that nobody put a price on.
A crew that hangs a 14-foot door for four hours should be paid for four hours, and the customer should be charged for it once. Keeping the count and the rate apart means a door and a window are never priced as the same work — and the total can be argued with, and corrected.
Fourteen feet is where it stops being the same job
Eave height comes off the design, and past fourteen feet the shell line stretches by 15% — a multiplier on the days, not a flat adder. House wrap, soffits and wainscot each add their own fraction of a crew-day on top. On the per-square-foot sheet the same four extras lift the rate instead: $2.75 a foot becomes $4.00 with all of them ticked.
The eighteen-foot eave gets bid at the same rate as the twelve, and the crew spends two extra days working off scaffold that never appeared on the quote.
Every crew knows a tall shell is slower — the quote should know it too. Height multiplies because lifts and staging slow every hour, while soffits are a job of roughly fixed size; one flat adder would under-bid the big buildings and over-bid the small ones, and both errors would hide inside one number.
Add a porch and the labour follows it
One job picked up two attached buildings and porches after labour was saved. It kept billing 3,300 square feet against a real 4,090 — 790 feet of crew time nobody charged for. Measurements are re-read off the current building every time the estimate opens. The things a person decided — the crew, the wage, a flat bid, a typed offset — stay exactly as entered.
The customer adds a porch at the second walkthrough, the labour figure keeps the square footage from the first, and the crew spends the extra days erecting roof nobody charged for.
Nobody wants to erect roof nobody charged for. Measurements refresh on every open and decisions never do: a typed number is claimed the instant you type it and comes back unchanged after a refresh, on the other person's screen, and after the drawing moves again. What a porch puts on the order is counted on the material takeoff.
The wraparound porch corner gets framed and paid for
Try itOn a SmartBuild-priced estimate, adding up porch legs undercounts a wraparound, because the corner belongs to both legs — 240 square feet by the leg sum, where the real figure is 340. Confirm the higher number once and it drives the customer's porch line and the labour together. A hundred square feet of roof framed for free on every wraparound is not a rounding error.
You bid the wraparound off the length of the two legs, and the corner where they meet gets framed, sheeted and roofed for free.
Only the person who drew the porch knows whether the legs really wrap — so the screen asks him, once. The answer then prices and staffs off the same number, and the crew is paid for the corner it frames. What a wraparound is made of is on lean-tos and porches; here we follow the hours it adds.
A porch priced as one number
Try itOn a SmartBuild-priced estimate the Porches / Attached panel prices the porch's material Per sq ft — 480 sq ft × $18.50 — or as One price, any amount the rep types. Switching to One price starts from what the rate gave, so nothing jumps, and the one price is what the customer's page shows for the porch. Under it, Note about the porch is the line the customer reads — 12ft covered porch across the front, matching metal roof. Both save with the estimate, and the measured porch still drives the labour.
The rep knows the porch sells for $9,500, but the screen only takes a rate, so he works out $19.79 a foot backwards and hopes nobody asks.
A rep prices a porch the way he talks about it — as one number. Letting him type it keeps the quote honest and the conversation simple, and the note tells the customer exactly what that number buys.
Take the flat bid when you have one, and give the crane day a name
Try itAn erector who quotes the whole shell at one price has no use for a crew calculator, so a single number replaces it outright. Anything the formula has no line for — a crane day, a site you can only reach from one side — becomes its own named line with an amount. Not fudged into the rate, where the next person cannot find it.
Your erector quotes the whole shell at one number, so you reverse-engineer a fake hourly rate to make the calculator agree with him, and the crane day disappears into it.
An erector who quotes one number shouldn't have to fake an hourly rate to match it. All the ways of pricing labour live in one block and print the same kind of named line, and extras stay outside the rate — each with its own note — where the next person can still see what they were for.
Markup on labour, where the risk is — never in the crew's pay
On a SmartBuild-priced estimate, Labor is its own section in the Markup section: a section markup on all of it, and a line markup on the calculator line or on any custom labour line — each stacking under the project markup, and every dollar of it built into the customer's Labor line. On an estimate built in Leads 2 Build, every row of the cost grid takes its own percent or dollar markup, so Overhead doors can carry 20% while Erect shell carries none. Either way the crew's budget is labour at your cost: the surplus a day-rate crew shares, a crew paid a share of the labour price, and the job's labour profit and loss all work from labour before any markup. The whole-job rules are under markup.
You put 20% on labour, and the crew paid a share of the labour price quietly gets 20% more for the same job.
Builders want margin on the risky work, and crews want pay that makes sense. Keeping markup out of the crew's budget means the owner prices for risk without overpaying the job — and the crew's share still reflects the work, not your margin.
Whether the customer reads the labour line is a switch
Try itLabour has its own switch on the way out. Leave it on and the customer reads Labor as a line under the materials; turn it off and the same money is still in the total, just not itemised. Nothing is deleted to hide it.
This customer does not get an itemised labour line, so somebody switches labour off in the calculator instead of on the quote, and $19,000 of crew time leaves the total on its way out the door.
Some customers want every line; some start haggling the moment they see labour. The switch changes what they read, never what they owe, so deciding how much detail to show can't turn into an accidental discount — and every other block works the same way under what they see.
One place turns a building into labour, and it used to be three
The internal estimate read $27,202.62 and the customer's page read $26,333.22 for the same building — $869.40 light, exactly the lean-to line. Three copies of the same derivation had drifted, and the copy the send screen used had no porch in it. There is one function now, and everything that needs those numbers calls it.
Your screen says $27,202 and the page in the customer's hand says $26,333, and neither of you can find the missing $869 while you are on the phone about it.
Nothing loses a customer's trust faster than two numbers for one building. The building becomes labour quantities in a single place, because a second copy doesn't fail loudly — it quietly prints a smaller figure on the document the customer keeps. Once priced, labour joins the one total the customer sees.
Send it, and the settings that made the number go with it
Saving a version freezes more than a total. The labour breakdown, the custom lines, the flat bid and every markup setting — and on a Leads 2 Build estimate the crew and the wage — are stored with that version, so a quote from March can be rebuilt, not merely re-read.
The customer is holding a March quote and nobody can say what crew size or wage produced it, so the conversation about the difference has no floor to stand on.
When a customer asks why the price moved, a rep needs an answer, not a shrug. Storing the inputs beside the output means an earlier version can be opened, compared and argued from.
After they sign, the labour block stops taking edits
Try itOn a SmartBuild-priced estimate, once it is approved the labour calculator goes read-only, with a lock on the heading. Changing a signed price is a deliberate act: unlock, and the change becomes a new version rather than a quiet edit to the document they already agreed to.
Somebody nudges the crew size on an approved job in April, the total moves $1,400, and the first anyone hears about it is the customer reading their invoice.
A customer who signed a number should never meet a different one by accident. The lock is on the editor, not the data — every field stays readable — and it stops the stray keystroke on a page somebody put their name to. Whether the figure held up against the crew's real hours is answered on the job's profit and loss.
- 1The square footage under roof is read off the design — main building, attached buildings, and every porch and lean-to.
- 2Overhead doors bill at their own rate and come out of the plain opening count, so the same door is never charged twice.
- 3Tick the extras — house wrap, soffits, tall walls, wainscot, insulation — and each adds its own line or lifts the rate.
- 4Add anything the formula has no line for as a named custom line with an amount and a note — or type one labour figure in place of the calculator.
- 5Price the porch's material per square foot or as one price, with a note the customer reads under it.
- 6Mark labour up at the line, the section or the whole job; the crew's budget stays at your cost.
- 7Everything you set saves to the job, so the next person who opens it sees your numbers, not a fresh guess.
Labour was recalculated from the building every time the screen opened and never saved. A rep who corrected the square footage or ticked a wainscot box lost it the second they clicked away. Saving it uncovered the next one: the recalculation overwrote the builder's own figure on the following load, so the job quietly reverted to the drawing's number and went out the door underpriced. Your number wins now, and it is claimed the instant you type it. Then the porch. A rep who knows what a porch sells for shouldn't have to invent a per-foot rate to land on it, so a porch can be one number. And labour is where margin and pay meet: mark labour up and the customer's Labor line carries it, but the crew's budget is still labour at cost — because a markup that leaked into crew pay would hand your margin to the job.
- Labour priced from memory instead of from the building
- Hand-entered labour lost on refresh or invisible to the other person in the office
- Openings and garage doors double-counted
- Porches priced by a made-up per-foot rate
- Labour markup leaking into what the crew is paid
Crew-hours labour mode
The mode that prices the way you actually staff a job: how many people, at what wage, with what burden on top, working how many hours a day, covering how many square feet in one. Tall walls stretch the days by 15%. House wrap, soffits and wainscot each add a fraction of a day; insulation and lean-tos get their own hour lines.
Flat labour bid and one-off labour lines
Two ways out of the formula. Flat replaces the calculator entirely with the bid you were given. Named extras — a crane day, a hard site — sit on top of the calculated lines, each with a label, an amount and a note. A master switch takes labour off the estimate altogether.
Labour keeps up when the building grows
Every time the estimate opens, the saved square footage is compared against the building as it stands now. If the building grew, the saved figure moves by the difference — and any number you typed on top stays exactly where you put it.
Confirm the porch square footage
The designer adds up porch legs one at a time, which undercounts a wraparound — the corner belongs to both legs and gets counted once or not at all. Confirm the real covered area for that job and it wins everywhere, labour included.