Your labor library stores the hourly rates, crews, and equipment your organization works with. When Exa generates a bid, labor lines are priced from your recorded rates instead of market guesses.

Open a project and find the Products section in the left sidebar tree. Below your product catalogs are three entries: Labor rates, Crews, and Equipment. Each opens as a table, and the dropdown at the top switches between the three views and your product catalogs.

The labor rates table works like a spreadsheet: click a cell to edit, and type into the empty bottom row to add a rate. Columns are Name, Description, Hourly rate, Burden %, and Default.

Click New rate for the full dialog, where you can also set an effective date. Burden % covers payroll taxes, insurance, and other costs on top of the base wage. Only one rate can be the Default; checking a new one unchecks the previous.

Archive a rate you no longer use from the edit dialog. Archived rates disappear from the list but stay visible on existing crews.

Click Import to load rates from a CSV or XLSX file. Exayard detects the columns automatically and shows a mapping screen where you match file columns to Name (required), Description, Hourly rate, and Burden %. Cells that could not be read are listed before you confirm, so nothing imports silently wrong.

A crew groups rates into a unit you reuse, like a framing crew of two journeymen and one apprentice. Click New crew, then add members by picking a rate and a count. You can also attach equipment to the crew.

The equipment table tracks the machines you rent or own: Name, Category, Daily rate, Hourly rate, and Owned. Add a row by typing into the empty row at the bottom. Leave Owned unchecked for rented equipment.

When you generate a bid from a takeoff, Exa retrieves your active labor rates and uses them for labor line items. A line priced from your library uses your hourly rate plus burden, with hours calculated from the measured quantities, and the bid document states how many line items were priced from your price book.

Only labor rates feed pricing. Crews and equipment are reference records: Exa can look them up in chat, but they do not price line items.

To see which line items were priced from your rates, open Reports and turn on the Price origin column. Lines priced from your library show a Labor book badge, and the same label appears in CSV, XLSX, and PDF exports.

Exa reads your labor library in chat. Ask "What hourly labor rate do I use for carpenters?" and it quotes your recorded rate. When pricing labor, Exa prefers your rates over market estimates and says so explicitly when it has to fall back. You can also create or update rates conversationally; Exa confirms the name and rate with you before saving.