I'm looking to learn about…
The industry’s fastest production-rate ROM estimating tool
EDGE for ROM Estimating
Watch The Edge founder, Thomas McGuire, as he demonstrates how you can create credible, defensible Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimates in minutes.
A Note for Edge subscribers: Please log in to The Edge to access the entire Help Center library for training and support
What you’ll learn:
Start a job file
Add and organize rooms
Capture photos and videos
Take clear notes
Collect signatures on-site
Generate professional reports
Sync and collaborate live

Watch training video below
If you’re an Edge customer, please log in to your Edge account and navigate to the Help Center. There, you’ll find a full library of how to videos and downloadable documents designed to help you get the most out of your experience. If you’re not an Edge customer, keep watching for a quick overview of Edge. Hi everybody, Tom Maguire here with a quick demo at the Edge V3. Now, if you haven’t used the Edge before, just to give you a quick background, we are it is based completely on data that we’ve got been gathering over the last thirty years. This particular these formulas that are in here have been used on projects since the mid-90s, and so multi million dollars worth of projects have been ran through the formulas that we’re using. That’s what makes it so successful is it has a track record of success. And that’s why we put it up against anything. And that’s what makes it so fast. It is the fastest estimating tool in the industry. And it’s only getting better. And so let’s get you caught up on some of the new features and, let’s go. Let me share this. All right. So here we are in the Edge. Now what we have in here, this is my admin account. And so we have a lot of projects in here. You can see we got Mold projects, we’ve been at the Sphere, we’ve got projects all over all over the world in here. And so let’s jump in here just to kind of give you a little start. We start off in the settings, and the settings is just going to be just where you’re going to enter in your data, and you’re going to enter in your labor rates. These are our default settings that I have built in, and you just you can set these at whatever your labor prices are in these four sections. And so next up is going to be our logo. You can upload your logo, you can change this anytime. And then our last little stop here is uploading our contract. Currently, I have one of our contracts in here, excuse me, and you can upload as you know if you have a contract that is for site specific for a certain contract for a certain national account, you can change this and upload that contract to match whatever your national account may be. And this is also where you change your password and all those. So simple, real simple stuff. Help Center. Here’s where you’ll find videos on everything that we’re going to talk about here today. We’re going to go through briefly, And so you can just click on whatever you need, and it’s going to be in here. There’s also downloads in here. We have thousands of files in here that are yours to use. Everything that we’ve ever used in our in our entire career is in here for you to use. Templates, scope templates, live T and M contracts. Everything is in here, including an estimating checklist, invoice, job book information, and the historical factors behind the edge. But right now, we’re going to get right into the action. So, I’m going to come down here and I’m going to pull up our Holiday Inn project here. And let me expand up here a little bit. All right, so what you’ll see here is the first stop is going be the project overview. Project overview is really, really just just the job information. So, is going to be your starting point. Real easy peasy, no problem at all. Our next step is going to go right to the estimate. Now you’ll see to give us for time’s sake, I’ve already entered some information in here. So we’re going to assume that the the Holiday Inn, which the average Holiday Inn in in North America is ninety to one hundred thousand square feet. And so we’re going to assume that the whole building is affected. It is going to be a fire and water scenario. And they told us, you know, they want heads in beds, they want us out of the hotel in sixteen days, so we have sixteen working days to complete the job. Now, you’ll see over here one hundred fifty. This is our is our labor production rate. Now, is all based on historical data, which I’m going to show you here and demonstrate here in a second. This is our default. So this is it’s automatically going to default to one hundred and fifty square feet per person per day. And this is universal. And so you’ll see here it’s imperial or metric, so this you can whether it’s square meters or square feet, it doesn’t matter. You can use this tool effectively regardless of whether it’s square meters or square feet. That’s why it can be used anywhere in the world like this without any issues. All right, so let’s start with our labor production rate. Now we’re going to I’m going show you here that you every facility has a labor production rate starting point. And so hospitality being three zero five. And then if we go down here to the bottom, these bottom four, these are going to be our most difficult jobs. And so our starting point being three zero five here, if we go into medical, it’s going to be two fifty one. And the reason that is because when we go to work in a medical facility, it’s totally different than working in a hospital, in hotel. A hotel, it’s heads and beds, heads and beds. When are you going to be done? When are going to be out of the way? And when are you going to give us our building back? All of that stuff. Medical facility is a little bit different. They want to know exactly what you’re going to do, exactly who’s going to be on the job, and exactly what’s going to happen. They’re not care less about, you know, the speed and more about the quality. And so it’s going to slow you down a little bit. The same is going to happen in industrial museums. And so these are going to be our lowest production rates in there. But let’s come back to our hospitality. So we’re going to we’re going to say this is a fire and water job, because usually if you have fire, you’re going to have water. And so we check on fire, we check on everything that applies. Next, we’re going to go to ceiling height, and our ceiling height in our Holiday Inn is going to be thirteen to twenty feet. For the algorithm to work, correctly, you need to have the highest ceiling point. And the reason that is because the higher the ceiling, then that’s going to be your most difficult part. Because every time that you have to get on a ladder, every time you go up on a lift, it’s slowing you down as you’re going up or going down. So, it’s affecting your production rate. So, you’ll see our production rate has already gone down from three zero five. So, next up we’re going to go to our floors. Now, most Holiday Inn’s now are about seven or eight stories, so we’re going to go two to twenty floors. Content concentration, we’re going to go to a level one, And if you have any questions on content concentration, just hover over the question mark here and it will describe what type of facility you have. Is it open? Is it congested? Is it heavily congested? All of those factors play play into our estimate. So we’re just going to go right to a level three contaminant level. Same thing. We have a level one, two, three for water level one, two, three for fire and a level three for a level three for mold damage. Mold and mold and asbestos are always going to be in that level three. And so for our hotel, for this one, we’re just going to use a level three on it. We’re going to do the HVAC, we will have some demo, content manipulation, false error false errors are going to be everything that’s above that false drop ceiling. So, we’re going get all of that. We won’t have mold or asbestos on the job, so we won’t have containment on the project. Next up, we’re going to choose the elevator system. We’re going to use the elevator system, and so those are the only factors that are going to factor in here. Now you will see things below the line here: pressure washing, water damage with demo, and water damage only. These are going to be if we had water damage with demo and water damage only projects, these would this would be where we would factor this in, and you can see what our labor production rate is for each one of those. And so, we’re going to leave them out for now. Right now it’s telling us that we’re at one hundred sixty for our labor production rate for this project. So we’re going to introduce then that to the edge. Now what that’s going to do, It’s going to instantly tell us how much labor that we need to do this job. So it’s going to tell us we need four supervisors and thirty five laborers. Now, what we can do to make this match our one to ten ratio for supervisors to labor, is we can now add some production labor to this. So, we’ll add five production labor in, and all these rates can be adjusted to whatever rates you use. So, this tool is completely adjustable to who’s ever using it, to whatever your labor rates are, in all of the above. And so, it’s very easy to use and very easy to adapt into how you estimate. And so, let’s pull this in here. We’re going to move this up to eight hours. We can add in as much labor as we want. In fact, I’m going to add in a safety person on this job. Sorry for my typing. And we’re going to throw them in at sixty five dollars and come in here. And you can add in as much labor as you want. This will be our starting point for our labor. Now you might have another project manager you want to throw in there. There could be another accountant, there could be even another safety person in here also. One another group that we’re going to add in here, of course, we’ve got water damage. So I got to have water techs. Can’t do anything out without water techs. So we’re going to put four water techs on this job, and these are going to be the guys that are that are doing all of our moisture content mapping and readings and all of our equipment checks and making sure everything is going well. And again, we can add as much labor here as we want. Next up, you’ll see that it has already automatically calculated our supplies and materials, our company owned equipment, our subcontractors, and our subsistence. All of these are set at my default rates, which are a little bit higher than than norm. So, for example, here in subsistence, if we are on the road, maybe we’re in the middle of Louisiana on a cat, we’re going to leave this a little bit high. If we are this is going to be our subsistence, it’s going to be our travel, our hotels, our per diems, everything involved in car rentals, truck rentals, everything involved with our travel for that specific job. So what we’re going to do is, if you were in town, we might drop this down to five percent to give us kind of a buffer to kind of catch travel time and such. We’re going to say that we’re on cat for this particular project. Excuse me. All right. So, owned equipment. This is going to be all of our LGRs, air scrubbers, our air movers, our ladders, our mop buckets, everything that the crew needs to do the job. And it’s just going to be our small equipment. Now, is our Holiday Inn. Now, we know that we’re going to use a lot of small equipment on this in this Holiday Inn, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to bump this all the way to one hundred percent. So this is going to represent our LGRs, our air scrubbers, our air movers. We’re going to put in, some desk and equipment and a generator in another area. And the best way to double check yours, your equipment number here is just click on this little calculator and enter in what using. And that will show you if this number is close enough. If it’s not, then we can adjust it appropriately to meet whatever your needs are. Supplies and materials for this job, we’re going to leave at twenty five percent right now. We can always change these. And subcontractors, this is going to be my baseline for subcontractors. We’re going to add more subcontractors down below here, because we like to have everything line items, so that we can tell what is in our subcontractor name. So, I took some shortcuts and I put some subcontractors in here already, and so you’ll have power distribution, generator, fuel, and an IH. All of them are in here already marked up at a straight twenty percent. I typically don’t do a ten and ten. I do a straight twenty percent, if they, you know, for our estimating purposes. When you get into invoicing, if they come back and they make you change that, can always do that. But for the purpose of estimating, I go for a straight twenty percent every time. So, these are some of our vendors, subcontractors, you can see with fuel, we’ve got power distribution, if you know, hotels, there’s usually not enough, there’s not enough power. So, you’re going to have to generate some power. So, yeah, here’s your distro and your power, your fuel. This is going to be for fuel for this power distribution, but also for what we’re going to add in a desiccant here down in a second. So, next step is our supplemental area. So, this is going to have several things in it. Document recovery is in here. We got Packout in here now. This is one of our newest features in here, and so this is Packout only. So we’ll use this feature if we’re doing a Packout only estimate. We’re not going be doing any Packout only on this project, but if we said we’re going to do some documents, maybe we got fifty boxes of documents that we’re going to do, and we’ll throw them in here. Maybe we got level two cleaning, and we’re just going to throw in a little bit here, just a tiny little bit out of the office area of the the hotel. Never forget about documents. Every project has them. Most restorers forget all about them, because they think that we don’t do them anymore. But we do. It’s still a very big business. So don’t forget about the documents. Next step, we’re going to come down here to our structural drawing. You’ll see that we have a square footage price in here. These are our default square footage price. You can use the default or you can use your own default square footage price. What we’re going to do is throw in here, we’re going to throw in ten thousand square feet is going to be we’re going to use a desiccant unit and a generator. And so this is going to represent our desiccant unit in our generator. Now if you’re familiar with E3, we’ve worked with Chuck and Chris with E3, a great tool. If you don’t have it, you should get it. But we worked with them to extract some square footage numbers, because we operate on square footage numbers. And so, this you can enter in the information for the project, and it will an E3 will tell you what your square footage price will be. For now, we’re just going to use our default prices. Ambient stabilization. This is going to be if we’re going to do just temporary cooling, climate control, heating, anything along that line. Excuse me. All right, next up is our ambient deodorization. We’re going to throw in ninety thousand square feet here on our ambient deodorization. Our square footage price here, this is a price that we worked with. We worked with the ProCure guys and with the hydroxyl guys. And so between the two technologies, we came up with a price that’s right there in the middle, that’s a happy medium that gets us to our number like this. And so the fifty five cents a square foot worked out for both cases, and so this is what we use. Now again, you can adjust this up and down to match whatever you’re looking to do. Alright. So, next up, our last little stop here is going to be our general recon and miscellaneous items. So, if we have line items that we want to throw in here that aren’t included in here, this is where we would do that. So, for example, if we have drywall, we’re doing demo, we’re going to put some drywall, you can see I have some in here already, but here’s our drop down, Here’s our drop down menu and you just simply pick your poison, whatever fits, whatever project you’re doing. These are blend rates, blend exactimate rates out of Southern California, so they’re a little bit on the higher end. And so let’s come in here, you’ll see that I have I selected a five eighths, hung taped with smooth finish, and we’re doing that for seven sixty a square foot. We have a thousand square feet that we’re doing. We have some flooring that we’re putting in. And then at the end, we’re going to do a final COVID cleaning at twenty five cents a square foot. And so I always recommend throw in COVID cleaning on your jobs. Everybody’s used to hearing about COVID now, so throw it in there. The next and last stop here is going to be our tax. If we have taxes, if we have contract fees, that’s where we’ll put in these custom fees here. Never forget about your tax when you put your estimate together, because it’s very important. Here, we get down to the bottom line. Here is our estimate. So, right now we’re at one point one and we’re at twelve point eight three dollars a square foot. We know we can do that job all day long for twelve point eight three dollars and we’re going to stay off the radar, because that’s the idea here is to get you to your number quickly, give you a good budget number, a good ROM number quickly, and to be under the radar of red flags from third party consultants and adjusters. So it’s very important that we keep everybody on the same page. We want we want everybody on the same page, so we don’t get in the in trouble. All right, so let’s jump back up here. If we’re happy now with everything that we see in in our estimate here, then my next step is going to be my scope of work. And I’m going to click on my scope, and you’ll see this is a scope template that we have everything that you can imagine is going to be in the scope. And we did this on purpose so that you’ll read through it and you’ll just say, well, that doesn’t apply. You can just simply highlight and delete. For example, we didn’t say we’re not doing any of the electronics, and so we’re going to highlight and delete. You simply go through the document, add in everything that applies, take out everything that doesn’t apply, and it’s and you’ll have your quick analysis of the job flow. Here’s everything that’s going to be in the scope. You’ve got your structure damage, your content damage, your odor control, your HVAC, your electronics, your vital documents, contents, special points, or project duration. All of those things are in here. You just simply highlight, delete, add in whatever you need, whatever you need to take out. You’ll see that there’s flooring, walls, ceiling, wall coverings, all of the line items that you would have an Xactimate are in here, but we’re not applying a number to each one of the line items. We’re giving a budget number or a ROM number for the whole project. So you just simply go down and and pick out what doesn’t apply, leave in what does, very easy to use. And so if we’re happy with this, or if we’ve done a Holiday Inn before and we want to pull up a scope from a past project, then what I’m going to do here is I’m going to go just right here. I’m going click on copy a scope from a past project and that’s going to bring me right here in a drop down, and I’m going to pull up a project from the past, and we’re going to throw it in here, and then that’s going to give us that scope from the past is going to be in here now from a project that we’ve done before. Now we can come in and edit it too so that it fits what we’re doing today. All right. So the beautiful thing is that quickly we can create our scope, our number, our ROM number, our budget number, our estimate. We can put everything together that quickly. Now our new feature that’s coming very shortly is our Project Tracker. Now the Project Tracker, this is going to be our Excel version, and the beautiful thing about this is it’s free. This tracker you can use to track your labor, your your equipment, your daily usage, everything can be entered into here. And it’s going to create your your your it’s going to give you your dashboards, it’s going to tell you what your daily run rate is, it’s going to be instantaneously creating an invoice so that you’ll always have an invoice sheet created. And so that’s always ready to go. And so it’s beautiful. And so the beautiful thing about it is it’s free. And we’ve been using this for about twenty eight years, constantly getting upgraded and everything. But and we have guys that are using it, that love it. They’re still using some old versions that I created a long time ago. And so it works, it’s free, and it’s at your disposal. Now, if we’re getting ready to export, here’s what the client gets. And so, we’re going to include our cover sheet, our scope, and include our contract. So, let me move my face out of the way here. Alright, so, download. This is what the client gets. Now, this is going to look just like every other time and materials estimate. It’ll look no different. And so here’s our here’s our cover sheet for our Holiday Inn. Here’s our breakout on our cost, all of our labor, our associated project costs, our supplemental area. And then here is our scope of work right behind it. And then right behind that, right behind our scope, which has everything in it, is going to be our time and materials contract with all of our labor sheets, labor rates, all of our equipment sheets, everything in here. These are all live documents. So if you don’t have a contract, a T and M contract of your own, you can go ahead and use this. It’s also available in the Help Center. And so you can download it, you can do whatever you want with it, it’s a live document, it’s free. There is no charge for any of any of it at all. And so, this is what the client gets. And let me come back here. Alright. So that is the Edge b three in a nutshell, the Raptor. Very excited about the the project tracker. That is actually going to be a permanent piece in here too as we move forward. The first version in here though is going to be in Excel. You just download it and go with it. You can create your scope of work, your estimate, all in one place, and also track your job. And so, with that, that is the Edge V3 Raptor and I can’t wait to, to hear from you guys. If you have any questions just give me a shout at Tom McGuire at Tom at large loss mastery dot com and, or you can call me drop me a text whatever at area code three two one two nine two nine zero six nine. Again shoot me an email at Tom at large loss mastery dot com. Alright everybody, thank you very much. Talk to you soon and have fun!

Click the menu icon to select a chapter marker

Click the language icon to select Spanish or French translation
Additional resources
FAQs
The Edge contains a comprehensive Help Centre directly inside the software. It includes detailed tutorials, templates and historical data guides. You must have an active Edge account and be logged in to access these resources
No. The Edge is a separate software tool. While you will get best results when you use both – Encircle capturing the field documentation and The Edge building the ROM – they are currently separate subscriptions.
No. The Edge is designed to produce a Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimate for budgeting, labor planning, and T&M projects. It is not a replacement for line-item estimating tools required by some carriers, but rather a companion tool to get job approvals and mobilization started faster.
The Edge creates ROMs based on over 30 years of real production-rate data from the restoration industry. ROMs are typically within 10-15% of final T&M invoices, making it highly defensible for setting initial budgets and securing contracts.
