How to check a cost estimate and generate a purchase order
Introduction
The Proposal and Costs modules allow you to calculate your direct cost for translating a particular XTM Cloud project.
Proposal
The Project Editor → Estimates → Proposal tab presents an estimate of a the project’s cost and duration, including a number of factors and parameters are applied to adjust this cost to give an exact estimate value
The factors are as follows: base cost per page, word or character, base number of pages, words or characters per day, minimum word or character count for an estimate, minimum project charge, currency, calculation method, work schedule, project management fee, project discount days or price factors, duration rounding point, paying VAT, copies, speed of delivery, metrics, language combination, workflow (price and duration factors for additional steps in the workflow), actual price or factors for document authentication.
These figures are drawn from either XTM Cloud global settings (Configuration → Data → Proposal factors → Basics) or, if there are certain values set for the XTM Cloud customer, XTM Cloud customer settings [Customers → (select a customer) → Estimate factors → Basics].
IMPORTANT!
The Proposal tab will NOT be displayed, if your XTM Cloud administrator selected the Disable proposals in project estimates settings, Configuration → Data → Estimates → Cost settings → Cost settings. In this case, the Estimates tab will be renamed to Costs and will only display the Costs parameters.
Costs
The Project Editor → Estimates → Costs tab allows you to calculate your direct cost for translating the project. These figures, which are displayed on the generated reports, are based on the rate cards of the Linguists who have been assigned to tasks in the workflow. To learn more about creating rate cards, read the following article: How to create a rate card for a linguist.
Instructions
Go to Projects → Project list, click on the context menu for a particular project and select Manage workflow.
Assign linguists to workflow steps. Then click the Save button.
Go to the Estimates tab. In the Proposal section, you can see a project cost estimate.
You can also manually send project cost estimates to your Linguists and/or LSPs in the form of a XLSX file, by clicking on the Export button.
Click the Costs tab, select a method for generating costs from the dropdown.
You have quite a few methods to choose from: metrics, current metrics, statistics source, statistics target, time or metrics, time or current metrics, time or statistics source, time or statistics target.
Then click the Generate button.
The costs have now been generated.
Open the context menu for the generated costs and click View.
Open the context menu for the linguist and click Generate PO.
8. The purchase order will download.
Good to know!
Keep in mind that user costs will not generate straight away. Certain prerequisites need to be met first. To research the most common issues involving cost generation, we recommend that you read the following article: Costs generation – most common issues & troubleshooting.