Materials List - Wrong wall length, wrong brick quantities.

[Sydney23]

Thanks so much for those inputs. It seems something I can use for rough costings, so long as I invest enough time into getting materials in walls, etc set up correctly. It's inevitably going to be complex I know, but thought one length of cavity brick wall shouldn't be too hard.

There really should be sand and cement in the list without adding mortar as another layer (which it isn't, I'm talking sticking bricks together, not render).

Just changed the framing materials reporting to cut list, looks good.

Materials reporting seems to have a lot of useful features, seems odd it's not set up a little for more 'out of the box' use, there's good money to be had from estimating software. I had HBXL estimating software a couple of year's ago and it was pretty amazing but it wasn't cheap. I think with not much tweaking CA could do something very similar (would need to add labour rates for each type of job, download live materials price lists from big suppliers, etc) and charge twice as much and/or simply sell a lot more copies.

Many of my customers ask me what I think their extension should cost. If I can at least show approximate materials costs that would be helpful to me, add in labour rates too and that would be even better. A quick look at labour suggests this is another thing that CA can do, but again only once set up by me.

Yet again with CA, I find myself saying that 90%+ of UK residential work would be covered by about 10 wall definitions, 10 different roof types, etc - that would probably take a CA guru a day to set up, then CA would become a must-have bit of software in the UK. It's all there, just don't understand why the interface/defaults set up is so poor.

If I ever get round to setting it up as suits the UK, I'll be offering my 'UK good-to-go CA' templates/defaults/set-up for around USD 2-3k per customer at trade shows and probably do good business. One day. No idea why CA don't do this themselves, the engine itself is great and making it easier to use would add greatly to its purchase appeal.