How to Use the Cost History and Comparison Dashboard in DESTINI Estimator
Beck Technology’s DESTINI Estimator construction estimating software’s integration with Microsoft Power BI includes a Cost History and Comparison dashboard, so you can see your projects’ cost history and compare it between projects.
“When you produce an estimate, you’re going to need to defend your estimate.” - Justin Wetherby, a Senior Estimator at Gilbane Building Company
This integration allows precon teams to share proof of where estimate numbers come from quickly and easily to owners. It also helps estimators quickly compare similar projects and provide a much more accurate estimate.
When you open the dashboard, you will see a high-level overview of your projects—the locations, the volume, and the cost. From this view, you can filter the projects in a variety of ways and compare them side by side. You can also customize this report by entering which properties you’d like to use to filter your projects.
Digging deeper, the Cost History and Comparison dashboard will give you an average cost per unit for each breakdown.
What is unique about this feature in DESTINI Estimator is that no extra work is needed by users. This data is automatically curated by the software.
Watch the video below for a DESTINI Estimator tutorial on how to use the cost history Power BI dashboard.
When you first open the dashboard, you're immediately taken to a high-level project overview. This shows you the locations of your projects as well as high-level information around the volume and the total cost of the project.
Here you can filter your project by project type and then by which specific estimates you’d like to look at and compare as well view the different versions of the estimates.
For example, you can pull up an office estimate and see all the different office estimates, the total volume based on the type of office and the total cost and compare them side-by-side.
You can also break down each project by properties like comparing them all by CSI Level one which will display the total cost for each one of those breakdowns and the total cost per square foot or any other control quantity you define.
With this information, you can not only compare these projects side-by-side but get a total average, an average cost per unit for each one of these breakdowns.
You also can escalate or deescalate each estimate both on a location factor as well as a time factor. So that you can time adjust all your estimates as well as provide regionalized pricing.
These dashboards are curated automatically in DESTINI Estimator, so no extra effort is required from the estimating team to capture this data.