When first imported from the D-Tools Library, products don't come with the labor required to install or program them. If you are working with a small set of products, adding labor for them is quick. However, manually adding labor may be cumbersome and time-consuming when you are working with 100s or even 1000s of products.
D-Tools Cloud can help you automate adding labor and defining accessories at the Category level via the "Category Rules" feature. Category Option is the setting you use to either leverage our curated labor estimates or ignore them and add your own.
Category Option setting can be set to Suggest, On, and Off. The Category Option setting you choose determines how soon and how much effort you will need to put into adding labor to products when you first start using D-Tools Cloud.
Some things to bear in mind before you set the Category Option setting:
Changing this setting frequently is not advisable as it overwrites your manual efforts to add labor at the Category level with the previous setting; you will see a 'Warning' message on the UI with the adverse impact of changing the setting.
This setting is not "rigid", and you have the flexibility to add your own labor at the Product or Quote level on top of the labor that comes with the Category rules.
Category Option Setting and Impact
Category Option can be set on the "Catalog > Categories" page under Settings.
Option | Impact | When to use |
Suggest | Our curated labor estimate is available at the product level in the Catalog | You are a growing company and want to leverage our recommendations
You are willing to spend time adding our curated labor estimate product by product
You can always change the setting to On when you are confident of our estimates |
On | Our curated labor estimate is automatically added for all products in all categories in the Catalog | You are a large company that plans to install a large number of products and wants to reduce the effort to add labor to them one by one |
Off | Our curated labor estimate is not available for any product | You want to set your own labor for products
You don't want to add labor for products and want to add labor as line items directly in the quote |
Behavior when the Setting is Changed
Change | Impact |
Off to On | You will start seeing the Category rule-based labor for all products, which will get added to new quotes or when you add products to existing quotes |
Off to Suggest | You will start seeing the Category rule-based labor as a suggestion for all products. You can accept the suggestion or ignore it |
Suggest to On | This is when you are confident using our curated labor estimates and want Cloud to add Category rule-based labor for all products
One drawback is that it will delete all manually added labor in the categories and subcategories |
Suggest to Off | This is when you don't want to use our curated labor estimates
One drawback is that it will delete all manually added labor in the categories and subcategories |
On to Suggest | This is when you want to evaluate our curated labor estimates at the Product level and are trying to avoid updating Category rule-based labor in the quotes |
On to Off | This is when you don't want to use our curated labor estimates.
One drawback is that it will delete all manually added labor in the categories and subcategories |