I'm not entirely sure I understand the question, but I take it you have, already, Sage Estimates?  Or are these Excel estimates?  If you have them in Sage already, you can copy the detail from one estimate to another.  There is no Excel upload of items available in Sage.

Sorry for the confusion Robert - I meant I have these takeoff files in Excel and yes trying to import them into Sage Estimating. I do not have any estimates in Sage Estimating other than just a couple of ones I've started building manually.

Disappointing we can't upload things we already have in Excel to get us a starting point, but thank you for the answer.

So may questions are raised by this that I have to ask, do you have a database?  If so, then selecting the same or similar items shouldn't be that hard.  I would doubt your Excel items have a Phase code and an Item code, and are structured with the 5 cost types, LMSEO.  But what might help you is to Make a blank estimate, Add one time items, copy the Excel description and paste that into the one time item description field, and then fill out the cost and labor fields.  That can save the typing somewhat.  Then, you can save the items you just made back to the database, where you can use them on future estimates.

How many years have you been using Sage?  

So may questions are raised by this that I have to ask, do you have a database?  If so, then selecting the same or similar items shouldn't be that hard.  I would doubt your Excel items have a Phase code and an Item code, and are structured with the 5 cost types, LMSEO.  But what might help you is to Make a blank estimate, Add one time items, copy the Excel description and paste that into the one time item description field, and then fill out the cost and labor fields.  That can save the typing somewhat.  Then, you can save the items you just made back to the database, where you can use them on future estimates.

How many years have you been using Sage?  

Yes we use the Sage estimating database for our Items and Assemblies. We use BuilderMT, which populates our costing/purchasing/sales options from the estimating database. We use our CAD program to build our estimate items takeoff list by Items and import that into BuilderMT. All Sage estimating does is keep the structure of the items and assemblies (assemblies are used in BuilderMT as our Sales Option features - retail side). So, the text/excel files I have are from our CAD program.

We've been using Sage in conjunction with BuilderMT for roughly 9-10 years. Their system for cost management and PO manipulation and sending with doc attachments is pretty good and it also pushes approved PO's to Sage Accounting, which we also use.

The text files do actually have the Phase code, Item code and BOM Class in them with a few other fields so I could easily match them up to the Sage Estimating database if there was an import feature. All of our items are setup as M costs so we don't need the LSEO - BuilderMT handles this portion on its side of the house, but we only use M & S for the starting estimates as it relates to Sage Items.

It is really not that time consuming for me to do a quick takeoff or item takeoff since I already have the item codes in my text file - maybe an hour or so of searching the phases and entering them and checking them off in the text file, but I just figured a few minutes is better than an hour or more of straight data entry.

My reasoning for looking at this is simply to have a potential backup way to create estimates and shorten our time to full estimate by starting with a base template in Sage and simply estimating the changes for a particular job. That would probably take 1.5 days at most on the majority of our jobs with a little bit of tweaking in BuilderMT for notes and manual cost updates for a couple of items; we could probably just put our notes in Sage estimate and let it roll.

Right now our CAD program recalculates the whole BOM from the drawing file, not just the changes and it takes us anywhere from 2-3 days to produce an estimate sometimes longer. We are working to streamline that, but we are simply assessing all of our options to be faster at producing our estimates.

Thanks for the input.

ok!  It sounded like you were not as experienced.  I can tell you that, yes, you can do this if you use  Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio, but the amount of learning you need to do that, if you're starting from scratch, will be way more than simply using Sage to re-input. If that's too much, then another way is that in Sage, in item takeoff, you can type the phase and item numbers in, and then enter quantities.

Lol, I can see why it would seem that way Robert. I appreciate the conversation and information. I am familiar with SQL management studio, but I think it's easier for us to just build our base estimates from scratch as we've discussed and Item takeoff seems to be the easiest way to look them up and search, etc.

Thank you.