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Labor roles and payroll burden

Your labor roles are how Flow prices the labor on every bid. For each role — Foreman, Journeyman, each Apprentice year, and any role you add — you enter the base wage you actually pay. Flow then applies your payroll burden (the costs that ride on top of every wage) and derives the fully-loaded rate the bid builder uses. Get the wages and the burden right once, and every bid you build afterward starts from numbers you trust.

Find them under Settings → Roles & burden. Only a tenant owner can view or change them.

The screen is two tables: Roles (each role's base wage and the loaded rates derived from it) and Payroll burden (the lines that make up the load, with their total). It deliberately shows the derivation, not just the answer — wage in, burden applied, loaded rate out — so you can always see why an hour costs what it costs.

What "fully-loaded" means — and Flow does the math

A role's true hourly cost is not the wage on the paycheck. It's the wage plus everything that rides on it: payroll taxes, workers' comp and liability insurance, benefits, PTO, tools, training. Bid the raw wage and you lose money on every hour you sell.

You enter the base wage; Flow multiplies it by your total burden percentage to get the loaded rate. A journeyman on a $32.00 base wage with a 27.91% burden prices at $40.93/hour — and that loaded figure is what every bid line uses.

Overtime and double-time get their own loaded rates, derived by multiplying the loaded rate (1.5× and 2× by default) rather than the bare wage — burden doesn't stop accruing when the clock passes eight hours. The Roles table shows all three: Loaded (ST), OT, and DT.

The seeded numbers are a starting point — make them yours

A new account comes with a starter set of electrical roles — Foreman, Journeyman, and four apprentice years — carrying market-rate placeholder wages. They exist so the bid builder works on day one; they are almost certainly not what you pay. Replace them with your own wages before you send a real bid — this is the single most important setup step for accurate pricing.

The same goes for the burden. A new account comes with a standard set of burden lines — Social Security, Medicare, federal and state unemployment, workers' comp, general liability, health insurance, retirement match, PTO load, tool allowance, and training — with typical Utah electrical percentages summing to about 28%. Each line carries a note about where the number comes from and when to change it ("use your actual MOD rate", "verify with your broker").

Go through the list with your bookkeeper's figures: tap a percentage to change it, remove lines that don't apply (no 401k match? delete the line), and add ones that do. The total at the top of the burden table updates as you go — and every role's loaded rates recompute with it.

Change a wage or a burden line

  • Change a base wage: in the Roles table, tap the dollar figure in the Base wage column, type the new wage, and click Save. The loaded rates recompute immediately.
  • Change a burden percentage: in Payroll burden, tap the percentage, type the new figure, and click Save. This moves every role's loaded rate at once — that's the point of the model.

Add or remove a role

  1. Click + Add a role at the bottom of the Roles table.
  2. Enter a role name (for example, Lead Tech) and the base wage.
  3. Click Save.

The new role is immediately available in the bid builder's role picker. Remove deletes a role you no longer use — Flow will tell you if something still depends on it.

Burden lines work the same way: + Add a burden line takes a name, a percentage, and an optional note.

Editing never changes bids you've already built

This is the important part. The moment a labor line is added to a bid, it snapshots the loaded rate (and the overhead & profit percentage) it was priced at. Changing a wage or a burden line afterward affects only lines added from then on:

  • New bid lines use the current loaded rates.
  • Existing bids — sent, signed, or still in progress — keep the numbers they were built with.
  • Your margins and job history stay accurate, and the bid builder can show you the exact rate behind any line's cost.

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

Who can do this

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

What's not in v1 yet

Being straight with you about the current limits:

  • One burden set for the whole shop. Every role carries the same total burden percentage. You can't give one role a different comp rate or benefits load than another.
  • One rate set per business. No separate tables per market, branch, or customer type.
  • No scheduled future changes. You can't queue a raise to take effect on a future date — you change the wage when it actually changes.
  • Overtime multipliers aren't editable here. OT and DT price at 1.5× and 2× the loaded rate; there's no control on this screen to change those factors for a shop that pays differently.