Building Your Marine Item Library

This article explains how to build, save, and reuse item sheets for marine and heavy civil work in Stimaro — so you build each common item once and pull it into every future bid in seconds.

How your item library works

Rather than rebuilding common items from scratch on every bid, Stimaro lets you save any completed item sheet as a reusable template. A saved template captures the item's full cost structure — its resources (labor, equipment, material, subcontract, rental, and other), quantities, factors, and cost code — and makes it available to import into any future project.

For marine and heavy civil contractors, this means a well-costed item like a driven steel sheet pile, a concrete cap, or an underwater diving inspection only needs to be built once. After that, you import it, adjust the quantity and rates for the new job, and move on.

Starter items. As part of onboarding, the Stimaro team will work with you to preload a starter set of common marine and heavy civil items into your account, so you begin with a working library rather than an empty one. From there, your library grows with every item you build and save.

Common marine and heavy civil items to build into your library

These item types come up repeatedly on marine and heavy civil projects. Build and save them as you go, and you'll have a ready library for future bids:

• Mobilization and general conditions: mobilization/demobilization, site access and staging, dewatering, marine survey and layout
• Pile and wall systems: steel H-pile (furnished and driven), steel sheet pile (furnished and driven), tie-back systems, vinyl sheet pile bulkhead
• Concrete: concrete cap, cap form rental, reinforcing steel, concrete placement subcontract
• Timber: timber pile removal, timber fender piles, timber decking, wale and cap replacement
• Fittings and accessories: galvanized hardware and fasteners, cleats and bollards, fender bumpers, navigation lights
• Environmental and specialty: turbidity curtain, erosion and sediment control, geotextile fabric, underwater diving inspection

Once you've built and costed any of these on a real project, save it as a template so it's ready to pull into the next bid.

Saving an item as a template

After you've built and costed an item:

1. On the Items tab, right-click the item in the left panel.
2. Click Save as Template.
3. Type a descriptive name — like "Steel Sheet Pile PZ-27 — Driven" or "Concrete Cap 4000PSI w/ Rebar."
4. Click Save.

The template is saved globally and is available in every project. It captures the item's description, unit of measure, cost code, production rate, and every resource row including quantities, factors, and rates.

Importing a template into a project

From the Items toolbar: On the Items tab, click the From Template button in the item list toolbar. The Import from Template dialog lists your saved templates, each showing its name, item number, description, and resource count. Click the one you want — it's added to your project and selected immediately.

From the empty state: When a project has no items yet, click From Template on the Items tab to open the same dialog.

After importing, the item arrives with all its original resources, ready for you to customize.

Customizing an imported item for your job

An imported template brings in the item's structure — its resources and their relative quantities — but you'll usually adjust it for the current job:

• Change the item's quantity: click the item header to open it for editing and update the quantity. Costs recalculate automatically.
• Adjust resource quantities and factors: click any Qty or Factor cell in the resource grid and type the new value.
• Update rates: if your rates have changed, update them on the Rates tab — every item that references those rates recalculates automatically, so you don't edit each item individually.
• Add or remove resources: click Add Resource to add a line, or right-click a resource row and choose Delete to remove one.

If a rate code used in the template doesn't exist in the current project's rate tables, that resource won't price automatically — add the missing rate on the Rates tab, or enter a manual rate on that line.

Managing your templates

Your saved templates appear in two places: the From Template button on the Items toolbar (while you're estimating), and Templates in the left sidebar under Libraries (the full list, where you can rename and delete). Templates are shared across all projects, and renaming or deleting one doesn't affect items already imported from it — those are independent copies.

The time savings

Building a complete marine item from scratch — looking up crew compositions, entering labor classifications, adding equipment by the day, linking materials, getting factors right — can take 20 to 40 minutes. From a template, the same item is in your project in under a minute, already structured and costed, needing only your job-specific quantities. A library of 15 to 20 well-built items covers the majority of scope on most pier, bulkhead, and marine structure bids.