I’m reviewing a proposal for a task order on a Job Order Contract.
The contractor is including the “minimum hours” of 4-hours on each task group, i.e. demo and roofing installation, in addition to the means hours shown for the individual tasks in that phase.
I am under the impression that the minimum is to be used only when the total hours of the subtasks don’t add up to the minimum. For example, a roof repair that only takes 2 hours, would be billed for the 2 hours extra required to get the 4-hour minimum. As opposed to a tear off and re-roof, that will take a crew several days, where the total hours far exceeds the minimum, and the minimum shouldn’t be included.
So, is the contractor entitled to the 4-hour minimum labor charge, when the hours on the phase of work will be 20 or more hours?
Replies
I don't know about rs means but I know about reality...and exactimate.
When you do a job, there is always a basic set up fee of some sort. Exactimate calls it "basic service fee". Each trade has their own number associated with it. Carpenters and roofers will get a couple hundred dollars as a basic setup fee. This would be added once for each trades for each job. The basic premise makes sense because each trade has a different set of tools and staging.
I used meanscostworks.com for about a year of fulltime estimating work. I generally weighed the estimated budget generated from RSMeans info against my companies numbers to guage the accuracy in our market. Based on my experiences in residential remodeling, the minimum should be included with the labor charges to bill the job. Means cost numbers appeared to be routinely lower that our own numbers by a healthy margin. And while we could certainly stand to speed up our workers on certain things, other line items just didn't add up at all.