Budgeting Money and Labor

[DRU]

I need to re-work my mega-budgeting Excel spreadsheet to more accurately break down scenery and better calculate labor. I created my current one off of my predecessor's spreadsheet, and it works well for budgeting money for a show, but not for labor. Are there any good books, websites, or online PDFs that can help me in setting up a better system?

 

[kicknargel]

If you PM me you email, I can send you the template I've developed over the years. Might at least give you some ideas.

 

[bobgaggle]

In my experience its better to build your sheet to fit your company. But PM me and I'll send you what ive built. Basically I have an excel workbook with a sheet for each scenic unit. I list all the steps required to build/paint/finish the unit then estimate how much time it'll take to do each step. Depending on the size of the show I can do a decent labor estimate in about an hour. I find it a lot easier to estimate steps rather than entire units. I know a cutlist for a basic door flat shouldn't take more than an hour, building the frame about the same. Skin it in 30 minutes. Paint will take 'x' people 'y' hours depending on # of treatments.

A simple formula adds up the total time for each step and gives me a time for the unit. Do that for every unit, multiply by you're pay rate and you've got a ROUGH labor estimate. I also tell the formula how many people are going to be working on a project. 1 man can cutlist a flat in 1 hour = 1 man hour. 2 guys to build a frame in 1 hour = 2 man hours. Etc.

My advisor in school gave me good advice- nothing can be done in 15 minutes. Minimum estimate is 30 minutes for any given task

 

[kicknargel]

That's similar to my approach. Totally agree that the key to accuracy is to break each unit into a series of tasks. My sheet has sections for ~20 units. Each has a section to list materials. I've built lookup tables, so I can put in a quantity and a material code and it grabs the price from another sheet and fills it in. Then there's a section to list the labor tasks and estimate hours. I have a few columns to separate carp and paints, load-in etc. Then these numbers go through a formula with a series of multipliers to account for pay rate, buffer time, wasted time (don't forget you lose at least an hour a day to breaks and clean-up, etc.) and profit margin. The results of all this end up on another sheet formatted to send to clients.

It was a lot of work to build, and requires maintenance. But as an independent shop I'm doing dozens of bids a year, so it pays off.

 

[rochem]

It was a lot of work to build, and requires maintenance. But as an independent shop I'm doing dozens of bids a year, so it pays off.

Not to drag this too far off-topic, but do you track actual hours/materials/budget spent on a show and compare that to your bid? How accurate would you say your estimates generally are? I know at some of the commercial shops here in New York, they're very strict about requiring their guys to "check out" materials - so before you can pull a sheet of 3/4" ply off the rack, you need to designate 1 sheet as going to show #517, or whatever it may be. I worked at a big nonprofit scene shop here in the city, and we tracked our labor hours, but only got specific with materials when it was specialty items like plastics and such. Our shop certainly did extremely detailed budgeting estimates, but as a nonprofit, the budgets were always a bit fluid, and the numbers would usually go out the window as soon as we started making big, sweeping changes. Having not spent a lot of time budgeting labor on a larger scale, I'm curious as to what a realistic goal is for accuracy in bidding.

 

[kicknargel]

I do track actuals on labor, and compare them to the estimate. I'd say that on the level of a project, we nearly always land within +/- 20%, and usually closer than that. I also share all the estimates with the floor, and they're supposed to raise a red flag early if a particular task is going south. That's not a fully successful idea.

I don't track materials, on the idea that it would be a lot of bureaucracy, and it's pretty easy to estimate materials accurately. It's not a judgement call how many sheets of plywood go into a platform.

 

[DRU]

I'm liking the idea of budgeting labor based on tasks. Do you make a list of tasks first, associate the materials needed for that task, and then determine the time, or is the tasks and materials calculated separately?

Is there an association between sq ft of flat needed to be built and the time? Say it takes me an hour to build (1) 4x8 hollywood flat by myself. That's 32sq ft/hr. Would making 64 sq ft take (2) hrs? Or does shape play a part? Can you co-relate in the spreadsheet the square footage and the time?

When using sq ft to calculate flats and platforms, do you base the cost per sq ft on what it takes to build a 4x8, or something else? I took a platform I made for my last show and calculated it via sq ft based on the cost per sq ft for a 4x8 and it came out double the actual cost. Is there a way to be more accurate?

 

[robartsd]

Is there an association between sq ft of flat needed to be built and the time? Say it takes me an hour to build (1) 4x8 hollywood flat by myself. That's 32sq ft/hr. Would making 64 sq ft take (2) hrs? Or does shape play a part? Can you co-relate in the spreadsheet the square footage and the time?

When using sq ft to calculate flats and platforms, do you base the cost per sq ft on what it takes to build a 4x8, or something else? I took a platform I made for my last show and calculated it via sq ft based on the cost per sq ft for a 4x8 and it came out double the actual cost. Is there a way to be more accurate?

Size and shape will matter. The less standard the shape, the more time it will take and the more materials that will likely be wasted. For rectangular pieces, I'd count all pieces smaller than the standard size as taking the same ammount of time. I'd only reduce material costs where the dimmention has been reduced by at least half. For larger rectangles, I'd estimate that time and material costs will vary with the square of the factor of the size increase from the standard size. For non-rectangular pieces I'd start with the estimate for a rectangle that could contain the shape, then add a time factor for the complexity of the shape.

 

[kicknargel]

I tend to make a list of all materials per unit, and a list off all tasks per unit. I don't find a need to associate a material with a task. I usually take the time to make an accurate materials list, because that can become the shopping list when we do the job. Sometimes when I don't win a job I wish I hadn't been quite so detailed with the bid, but them's the breaks. And in a non-bid envirnoment, might as well be a specific as possible.

I've just started experimenting with square foot calculations, for the purpose of rough estimates. I looked at the actuals from old jobs, and calculated them out per sq ft. You get a lot of varience depending on complexity. So I'm working on a system where I can look at a unit and add up $x/sq ft for basic structure, plus $y/sq ft for complexity plus $z/sq ft for paint detail, etc. Referring back to my examples to find comparables. Then I'd assume my answer is somewhere inside a 2x range. Probably near the bottom, as it's easy to overlook something that costs, and it's rare to over-estimate.

 

[bobgaggle]

Start with the Unit and what you'll need to build it. I find that if you start with guessing labor without considering materials you start messing up. For example, I did an estimate on a show where the designer spec'd flats for some shadow play, which would just be a simple painted mus covered theater flat. After I sent it my list of questions about the prelim packet, I found out she wanted white plexi, which of course changed everything about its construction.

I've never had much success estimating based on square footage. I guess it works for home building but I never thought it translated into theater well, given how often we do stuff that isn't "standard"