Indirect Costs Overview

Indirect costs such as the cost of prime bond, mobilization, or site supplies are typically overhead costs that are not directly associated with a particular project deliverable but contribute to the total cost of the project. However, indirect costs can be assigned to a pay items. This gives you the flexibility to more accurately control the cost basis of bid items and strategically price the work to maximize cost recovery and profit.

Once your direct costs are defined, you can add indirect project costs. Estimate provides two ways you can create indirect costs:

  1. Default Indirect Cost Items:  These are pre-built cost items created by InEight Estimate, located at the top of the CBS Register.

    A screenshot of a cell phone Description generated with very high confidence

  1. User-Defined Indirect Cost Items:  Any cost item you create in the CBS Register that is not assigned to a pay item is considered indirect cost.

    A screenshot of a cell phone Description generated with very high confidence

    The Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS) located in the Library under the Estimate tab, Master Breakdown Structures section, controls which of the default indirect cost items to copy into new job folders.

Navigation to Indirect Costs

From the Estimate tab of the InEight Estimate landing page, you can quickly access indirect costs from the Indirect Cost section.

  • Select Indirect Cost Items to open the Cost Breakdown Structure Register filtered to only your indirect costs

  • You can select Prime Bond, Price % Add On, and Job Financing to access those indirects

The following section takes a closer look at the default indirect cost items.