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      Rules for importing a 3rd party bill

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      Rules and best practices

      You can import 3rd party bill data and automatically populate the rate build up and bill of quantities ready for pricing and/or zoning. This helps you to create estimates faster and removes the need for you to create data manually. You can also produce documentation that mirrors your client’s bill format and naming conventions. When importing a 3rd party bill, there are best practice rules that should be followed to ensure the data is imported correctly in the format required.

      Further details on importing 3rd party bills can be viewed in article 'Importing third party (client) bills' 

      • All formatting should be removed when copying and pasting data into the Chalkstring template.
      • Only paste the data values into the spreadsheet.
      • The data in the import spreadsheet should be the in the same order in which you want the products to appear in the rate build up.
      • Any rows which do not contain data will be disregarded by Chalkstring when imported.
      • If no data has been entered into a 'zone name' column, Chalkstring will use the default name of ‘Bill quantity’ for each zone on the spreadsheet when imported. If these zones are not required, they can be manually deleted by modifying the zone and clicking the delete icon
      • A zone will be created per unique zone name entered into the ‘Zone Name’ column.
      • If the description, unit of measurement and at least zone 1 quantity fields are populated, but not the product name field, Chalkstring will give the products default names of ‘product1’, ‘product2’ etc.

      Below is a table of units of measure which can be used with the Chalkstring bill import template.

      Unit details
      1. The units listed in bold are the accepted units available in Chalkstring.
      2. These are the units, shown in various different formats, that Chalkstring will recognise and automatically convert to the accepted units when importing into Chalkstring.
      Any unit that is not listed in this table will NOT be recognised by Chalkstring and will result in an error when importing the spreadsheet.
        

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