Welcome!
Glad to see you posting!
There is quite a lot to answer all your concerns.
Many issues have different answers depending on how you are using D-Tools.
If you are dragging and dropping shapes to draw and reverse engineer your proposal, you will miss many opportuities to control a lot of the issues you raise.
Best practice is to select packages and products in text then move to drawing.
That being said, I will outline a few things for you to consider in your database setup related to wire.
1. Build Wiring Packages that contain the wires you use for each assembly you install.
EX:
Package name
Wiring Package - Distributed Audio - Speakers and Source Control
Within a package, you can capture typical wiring topologies, hide the wire from appearing in the proposal, define a wire length that is different from the default wire length for the project, and define a default head end for the wire.
Too many good things to not use!
2. Chasing your labor per foot for wire while concerning yourself with overcharging for pulling multiple wires at a time versus one wire at a time is a valid concern.
However...
Manipulating the labor for products in the database and packages settings like 'ignore labor for equipment and wire' to do this will result in inconsistencies throughout your database, and in some instances, incorrect calculations when you make phase difficulty adjustments (more on the in a bit).
To manage you database as it grows, labor, phase and margin settings should be done by Category and Type so that items of like Category and Type have the same values for these fields in as much as possible.
So here is our solution, let all the wire carry the same value per foot for labor. Once you complete the assembly of your entire project, run a report on the hours by phase. At this point you make a judgement based on your experience and the job conditions as to the amount of total labor in the rough-in phase
-is it too much?
-not enough?
If it is too much and that is caused by having several packages that contain multiple wires all carrying labor and being pulled from the same start point to end point, then lowering the total labor hours (and therefore dollars) for the rough-in phase is required.
Rather than chasing individual items to do this, go to D-Tools>Options in your project and lower the difficulty factor for the rough-in phase by the percentage you wish to lower the total rough-in hours.
In one step, you accomplish to adjustment and its for the project, rather than having inconsistencies and loads of special cases and exceptions in your database, that is too hard to manage and over time will just get up-ended, we have seen it time and time again, this approach keeps it simple and gets the same result in the bottom line.
This approach is all part of 'system selling' rather than selling wires and labor and parts individually, you will drive yourself crazy trying to place exact costs on installed assemblies in any design and estimating software.
Keep the database consistent, manage the adjustments in the project globally when possible rather than through individual price and labor adjustments.
3. Default wire length is something we use for custom length interconnects not rough wire since rough wire is best placed in packages and therefore isolated from defualt wire length. For more on custom length interconnects read this:
http://www.imakenews.com/d-tools/e_a...Vn2b7,b4lbvLHD
4. Labor as a product is set up best depending on what the labor item is.
If you bring in a cleaning crew at the end of a project who charges $500 to clean up and you wish to mark that up to say $750, use the fixed labor setting. This will add dollars to you labor costs but no hours, which is accurate because its an outside crew that consumes no hours in your company.
Variable is the typical setting to use along with the checkbox for 'use labor values attached to the phase'
This is excellent for having labor items in your database for Programming that might be accessories to products in th finish phase that require rogramming.
5. We find that .006 hours per foot is a good setting for labor on rough wire, using the methodolgy for adjusting the overall hours by phase using the difficulty factor gives you loads of flexibility to accomodate job conditions and other varibables.
If over time you find you are most often raising or most often lowering you difficulty factor in the phase to get your hours right, then its time to use the product grid in D-Tools MMPD and make a global adjustment to labor up/down as needed by product Category and Type.
6. Final point, settings in a project are isolated from the database and vice-versa for good reason. There are several refresh and restore setting within a project to capture updated settings for product pricing and labor throughout D-Tools.
The End-
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