Extremely common scenario: the main measure of an assembly can be fractional (eg. a length), but certain components of that assembly are not.

For example, the very first assembly I tried to build was of two components: 1/2" EMT Conduit, and a 1/2" EMT Coupling. For every 10 feet, a coupling is required. Sounds easy, right?

Unfortunately, if you need something like 55 feet of conduit, I can only get my assembly to give me 5.5 couplings for a quantity. While this is seemingly unimportant (just round down manually, right?), if this is done over and over again, the rounding error can add up to a substantial amount. It is not uncommon to have over 100+ runs of conduit for a given project. Many estimators use things like bid items and keep each conduit run as a separate line in their takeoff, so it's possible that this could add an extra coupling 100 times. There should be a rounding formula, or better yet, add the "mod" operator like most other programs that allow formulas/algorithms to be built. This would allow users to calculate exactly the quantities they need.

by: Ryan B. | over a year ago | Estimating