Help with finish & fixture pricing schedules

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to set up some interactive schedules to calculate costs for a residential project. I'd like to be able to calculate total costs for finishes like tile & flooring. And do a total cost tally for plumbing and other fixtures. I have some experience working with door and window schedules, but I'm hitting a couple snags with takeoffs:

1. Using slabs as floor finish, and walls as tile finish, I can set up an element schedule to calculate total area of a finish, but cant find a way to set a parameter for cost per square foot, and have it calculate total cost based on the area. Is there a way to assign costs to an element?

2. I'd like to create a schedule that tallies plumbing fixtures costs. each object seems to have it's own cost parameter, but is there a way to access a universal cost parameter that would comprise all objects on say, the plumbing layer? So I could list & sum the costs of all fixtures?

3. Creating a schedule calculating slab areas, I've added a parameter "zone name", hoping that the room the slab is in would be listed, but I just get "-" for zone name.

Am I way off here? will archicad only provide the quantities & areas which I will then have to plug into a spread sheet to get actual costs?

Thanks in advance

[Barry Kelly]

1. Interactive Schedules can't do calculation based on the quantities.
It is a long standing wish for it to do this.

2. You can get a SUM of you quantities (in this case cost) so long as you activate the "SUM" button in the "Fields" section of the schedule settings.
You will need to add a field for the cost parameter and then activate the sum button - similar to the attached image.

3. I can't say about this as I don't use zones in any of my schedules.
But I had a quick play and could not get this to work either.

Barry.

[Karl Ottenstein]

The only way to get the math done is either:

1. Use the List Schemes of the Calculate menu - which requires creating property objects to do the math. This process is not described well in any Graphisoft documentation, but many people have given examples here over the years, notably Rick Thompson. There is one book available describing how to use this functionality:
http://www.fc-cadlink.com/fccl-portail/archicad-from-cad-to-quantity-survey


2. Publish your quantity take-offs (from the interactive/Element/Component schedules) as CSV files - just create views for each schedule, make a publisher set, set it to text output, etc... Link these files into either a database program (Access / FileMaker) or spreadsheet which further links material codes to a pricing table to do the math...

Either method is pretty time consuming to set up - and prone to errors, but at least once set up for one project it is relatively easy to modify for the next.

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

Thanks,

I suppose exporting takeoffs to a spreadsheet could be beneficial as you could more easily organize, modify costs & get a running total.

[Anonymous]

Karl wrote:
Either method is pretty time consuming to set up - and prone to errors, but at least once set up for one project it is relatively easy to modify for the next.

Cheers,
Karl

Once you customized a schedule you want to use in other projects - how is that done exactly?

Thanks.

[Barry Kelly]

In the "Scheme Setting" you will find an "Export" and "Import" button.
Select the scheme you want to "export".
Then in your other project "Import" and browse for where you saved that file.
Barry.