Setting your labor rates

Your labor rates are the hourly costs Flow uses to price the labor on every bid. You set one rate per role — Foreman, Journeyman, each Apprentice year, and any custom role you add — and the bid builder multiplies those rates by the hours on each line. Get them right once, and every bid you build afterward starts from numbers you trust.

Find them under Settings → Labor rates. Only a tenant owner can view or change them.

What "fully-loaded" means

The rate you enter is a fully-loaded hourly rate — your true cost to put that role on a job for an hour. That's not just the wage on their paycheck. It includes everything that rides on top of the wage:

Payroll taxes
Workers' compensation and liability insurance
Benefits (health, retirement, PTO)
Your shop overhead — trucks, tools, the office, the phone

A journeyman you pay $32/hour might genuinely cost you $55–$65/hour once all of that is counted. Bid the raw wage and you lose money on every hour you sell. Flow bids the fully-loaded number so your margin is real, not imaginary.

Flow doesn't calculate the burden for you in v1 — you enter the finished fully-loaded figure. If you don't have it yet, your accountant or bookkeeper can usually produce it quickly from last year's numbers.

The seeded rates are placeholders — override them

When your account is set up, Flow seeds a starter set of electrical roles with Northern Utah market-rate placeholders. They exist so the bid builder works on day one — they are almost certainly not your numbers.

Replace them with your own before you send a real bid. This is the single most important setup step for accurate pricing.

Change a rate

Go to Settings → Labor rates.
In Active rates, click the dollar figure next to the role you want to change (for example, $58.00/hr).
Type the new fully-loaded rate and click Save.

The new rate takes effect immediately for new bid lines.

Add a custom role

Your shop may have roles beyond the seeded electrical ones — a lead tech, a helper, a low-voltage specialist.

Under Add a role, enter a role identifier — a short, stable name. Lowercase with underscores keeps it consistent with the built-in roles (lead_tech, helper).
Enter the hourly rate (fully-loaded).
Click Add role.

Each role can have only one active rate. If you try to add a role that already exists, Flow tells you — change the existing one instead.

Editing a rate never changes bids you've already built

This is the important part. When you change a rate, Flow does not reach back and rewrite older bids. Every bid keeps the rate it was created with.

Flow stores rates as a dated history: changing a rate closes out the old figure and opens a new one from that moment forward. So:

New bids use the current rate.
Existing bids — sent, signed, or still in progress — keep their original numbers.
Your margins and job history stay accurate, and the audit trail shows what the rate was at the time each bid was built.

You never have to worry that a mid-season rate change will silently alter a bid a customer already approved.

Who can do this

Labor rates are owner-only. Estimators and other team members can build bids using the rates, but they can't see or change the rate table. If you need to adjust rates, sign in as the owner.

What's not in v1 yet

Being straight with you about the current limits:

One rate set per business. You can't keep separate rate tables per market, per branch, or per customer type. If your costs differ by region, that's on the roadmap, not here yet.
No scheduled future rates. You can't queue a raise to take effect on a future date — you change the rate when it actually changes.
You enter the fully-loaded number yourself. Flow doesn't compute burden from a base wage. See What "fully-loaded" means.

Building a bid (coming soon) — how rates flow into line-item pricing
Adding and managing team members (coming soon) — who can see and do what