Zeitview has long excelled at fast, accurate drone-based data capture of our customers’ portfolios, identifying needed repairs and anomalies across rooftops, facades, landscaping, and pavement. Over the summer, we added a Cost Estimation feature to Property Insights. This allows companies to understand repairs and anomalies in terms of the cost needed to repair them, not just the severity of the defects themselves. This is a key component for facility and maintenance managers as they prioritize repairs and maximize budgets and worker capacity.
Property Insights integrates with EstimateON from Verisk in order to provide cost estimates for thousands of repairs. But many companies have specific operations-and-maintenance contracts with defined labor-and-repair costs. Customers can now use their own cost data within Property Insights.
This tool is called Cost Book and enables customers to import and use their costs within Insights. Admins now have access to a new section under Organization Settings called Cost Book. Within this section, admins can do the following:
- Add, edit or delete cost entries
- Search for existing cost entries
- Hide Zeitview’s cost data from their organization’s view
Creating, editing and deleting costs in Property Insights
To create a new cost book entry click + New Cost Book Entry on the top righthand side of the screen. Any changes to the Cost Book will be reflected across that organization.
To locate a specific cost, users can begin typing within the search field. For example, if I wanted to find a specific “vent” cost entry I would input that into the search to narrow my results.
Hiding Zeitview’s cost data from your view
Customers have the option to use their own cost data plus Zeitview’s cost data. If you don’t want to include Zeitview’s cost data, an Admin could check the box “Use [org name] cost book only.” This will hide Zeitview’s cost data from that Org’s view across Insights. If an Organization has access to both their own and Zeitview’s cost data, users will see that data separated by the Org’s data and Zeitview’s. If the Org Admin hides the Zeitview cost data they will only see the Org’s data.
For example, many large corporations have spent years dialing in their supply chain costs, and have negotiated lower unit costs than the averages indicated in our API. On the other hand, a company may contract exclusively with unionized vendors and their costs might be a bit higher than the average. Whatever the case, Property Insights gives customers the ability to choose whether — and to what extent — they use their own cost data.
