When operatives are on site, they will select the required materials using a form. Each selected material automatically includes its associated rate, ensuring accurate cost capture.
These selections are:
Recorded on the job sheet, which is linked to the specific project.
Fed directly into the overall job cost, giving real-time visibility into material expenditure.
This streamlined process ensures accurate tracking, reduces manual input errors, and supports precise cost reporting for every job.
Hierarchy of Rates in Onetrace
How rates data is organised and set up is important for how rates are calculated. Below is a high-level overview of the rates structure within Onetrace:
Why do we use rate groups?
Rate groups are broader categories that segment different types of rates incurred during a project according to your business needs.
💡 Rate groups example:
Materials - could contain the pricing set for various materials used to complete a project.
Labour/Operative - could include the costs assigned to operatives for the jobs they’ve performed.
Charge - could include the costs you will charge your client after the project is completed.
Why do we use rate sets?
A rate set is a collection of rates, a set acts like a price list. Multiple rate sets are needed so that an organisation can update their rates (prices) without affecting historical jobs or projects. See examples of rate sets below.
Organisations may also use different rates (prices) for different customers (dependent on size or frequency of work), they can achieve this by using rate sets. Without rate sets, you could only have one rate per material across the whole of Onetrace, no matter if you do 10 projects a year or 1000. This is inflexible for the nature of work that subcontractors undertake and also compromises historical data.
💡 Rate set examples:
Yearly - you might wish to have yearly rates (2023 rates, 2024 rates)
Client based - discounted rates for your most valued clients (10%, 20%)
Manufacturer/Brand - rates categorised as per the manufacturer (Hilti rates)
What are rates?
Within a Rate Set, each material must have one unique rate to maintain pricing consistency. You cannot assign multiple rates to the same material within a single Rate Set, because this would result in conflicting prices.
💡 Learn how to import rates in our other articles in this collection, import via a CSV or add in custom rates.