Requirements come from the customer or project owner, to define the desired results from this project or proposal. To fulfill these requirements your company must provide some deliverables/assets or tasks, and do some work.  Resources such as labor, material, equipment, sub-contract, travel and other direct costs are needed to complete this work. Viewing an estimate this way is more structured, and leads to more insight, resulting in more accurately estimated costs.

Click on the COST STRUCTURE tab (once you are comfortable with understanding the customer's requirements) to view the task and activity breakdown for the delivery of this estimate, and to further break-down the work packages or tasks required.

1. Check or uncheck the boxes that apply to the types or categories of cost inputs for your estimate. In the screen shot example above there are labor, products & services and other direct cost. Although the range of estimating strategies and therefore the types of resources required to complete the work is normally set in the proposal or project WBS tab, you can check or uncheck these boxes within the estimate also. Tabs will appear at the top, as highlighted above, one for each box which is checked, appearing when checked and disappearing when unchecked. For example, in the screen-shot below, the user checked the Labor box below so that the Labor tab now appears at the top
2. Copying previous work is normally carried out as you input a new task or WBS description, or you can click one of the options under 'Have you done similar work before?' to copy work in from a previous proposal, project or template. Select the option (proposal/project vs. template) and then select the prior proposal or project, followed by the specific estimate within that proposal or project, that you wish to copy estimated resources from. Click on the COPY button to copy data from the selected source proposal, project or template

       After clicking the COPY button you will be allowed choose whether to copy sub-tasks, labor resource estimates, bill of material or material cost estimates, travel or other direct cost estimates, from the estimate selected above.

Once you confirm this popup the WBS and tasks of the selected estimate you are copying from will appear in the list of WBS-task deliverables lower down the screen. You will also see any copied labor, material, travel or other direct costs on their respective input tabs.