So, one of my main goals for this blog is to increase the use of our AutoBid products.  One of our most underutilized features in the program is Symbols.  Symbols can be found in both AutoBid Mechanical and both AutoBid SheetMetal, although the functionality is slightly different.  For this blog post, I'm going to focus on why you'd want to use Symbols.

Symbols can be found under this nifty little icon:



I love this icon because it's so generic.  In the piping word, it's a pump.  In the sheet metal world, it's a fan.  Although, don't ask our developers what it is - they still think it looks like a hair dryer.

To QuickPen, this icon represents our Symbols - or Equipment.  The purpose of our Symbol Schedule is to allow users to quickly add the equipment on their project and then take if off.  Here are some of the benefits to using the symbols:

1.  You can take off the item early - and then assign information to it later.  Don't worry about specifics now - take off the item now generically (AHU-1) and worry later on about the specifics of that item.  Add labor, accessory items, or even attach a specific manufacturer's information.  Just add it to the Symbol Schedule - and we'll apply it during calculations. 
2.  We can now export these symbols directly to Excel (via Rapid Reports) to be used in your quoting process.
3.  You can assign Accessory Items to your symbols.  Accessory items are anything you want to make sure you get covered for each items - additional filters, VFDs, special start-up, etc.  You can either make sure that they are included in your vendor's quote - or you can assign costs to them.
4.  By using the labor and costs components of symbols, labor will be broken down correctly when reporting from AutoBid.  If you manually take off these items and put them into the a spreadsheet, the labor won't be included when you summarize data for scheduling or schedule of values.  By using Symbols, you can use AutoBid to automatically generate all of this information for you.

So, over the next few weeks, I'll additional blog posts about how to use Symbols more effectively.  If you have ideas or want me to address something specific, please let me know.