When building out a quote, you can pull products from the D-Tools Library and even import your own list of products. However, Labor can become the forgotten essential piece to your quote. This article will show you how to get labor setup, associated with products, and even add labor line items.

Before you can quote Labor, you will want to make sure you have set up your labor types in D-Tools Cloud. By default, you will have a labor type called installation. You may have more labor types you want to associate with your quotes and project.

It is easiest to manage this in the settings under the Labor section, but you can also create/manage labor types from the catalog or inside a quote.

For more on managing labor types, click here.

You can configure labor on a product one by one or use category rules to help. We recommend using category rules to get started and tweaking these on a product-by-product basis.

If adding labor to a product item by item, or even with category rules, is too much for you, check out this article.

A Category labor rule is a rule that adds labor to a product that has the associated labor type. For example, when a speaker gets added, it will come with 30 minutes of installation labor because I have a labor rule set up to add 30 minutes to any added speaker.

Here you can get creative and add multiple labor types to a category, which will then get passed to the products. In the below screenshot, three labor types were added that different teams/employees work on, with different costs and prices for each labor type.

When building a quote, after you add a product to your quote, click on the product to view the sidebar. In the labor section of the sidebar, click the Add Labor button. Here you can select from the labor types you created above or create a new one. You then can select a fixed rate or select an allotted time. You can also edit existing labor that was added from category rules or individually added before.

You can also configure labor on products from within the catalog.

Quotes in all views show a summary of all labor for the project in the Labor Summary area of the quote. Labor Summary is meant to show labor added using Category rules or line items—Labor Packages and Labor Types.

Here, a Labor Package "Project Management + Extra" is added as a line item. The package is listed in the Items area, and the labor that came with the package is added as new Labor Types or factored into the existing Labor Types.

Learn more about Labor-Only Packages