Import your estimating assemblies from Excel
Your cost assemblies already hold years of crews, yields, and waste factors. Bring them into Darwin from the workbook you use today, check each one against your own totals, and decide what enters the catalog.
Two ways to bring the workbook in
We love Excel. We just stopped asking it to be our memory. Your breakdowns stay the source, and Darwin keeps track of where every value came from.
Darwin’s Excel template. Download the template, fill in one row per line of each assembly, and upload it. Useful when you are starting a library or cleaning one up.
Your workbook as it is. Upload the workbook in its own layout. Darwin’s reader finds each assembly and copies it, citing the sheet and cell of every value, and Darwin checks each citation against the file. Useful when years of assemblies already exist.
Nothing reaches the catalog without a review
- Read. Darwin reads the file into a draft. Every value keeps the sheet, row, and cell it came from.
- Settings. Set the file’s currency, hours per workday, and the defaults new materials need. Exchange rates are only needed when the assemblies mix currencies.
- Resources. Each distinct material, crew, or piece of equipment is decided once for the whole file: use a catalog item, create a new one, or decide later.
- Assemblies. Each assembly shows Darwin’s rebuild beside your file’s total. Fix names, units, and quantities, open the source cells, or accept a difference with a note.
- Import. Import the assemblies that are ready in one step, and choose the Price Lists the new items join.
- Verify. Imported modules start unverified. A verifier reviews each one before the team relies on it.
How an assembly becomes a module
An assembly, a unit price breakdown, or what Latin American estimators call an APU (análisis de precios unitarios): each describes how your company builds one unit of work, and so does a Darwin module. The import keeps that logic and separates it from the decisions that belong to each estimate.
- Crews and day-rated equipment become count ÷ yield coefficients
- A single waste rate shared by an assembly’s materials becomes one “% of materials” line
- Markup, overhead, and AIU are set aside, because they are decided on each estimate
- New items take your file’s price as their reference price
- Prices of items already in your catalog are never overwritten
Before you send a file
- Darwin reads .xlsx and .xlsm workbooks up to 100 MB. Save older .xls files as .xlsx first.
- The original workbook is not kept after it is read.
- A re-import never overwrites a module you already imported.
- For the first imports, the Darwin team works through the file with you.
Next: see how imported modules are repriced with Price Lists, or read the warehouse scenario.
Start with the assemblies you price most.
In a demo we walk through an import with a sample workbook, then reprice the resulting estimate with a different Price List.
Request a demo