How the numbers are made.

Unit conversions in EARTHVOQ use the defining ratios, not decimal approximations of them. A cubic yard is exactly 27 cubic feet. An acre is exactly 43,560 square feet. A short ton is exactly 2,000 pounds. A mile is exactly 5,280 feet.

Every measurement reduces to one base unit — feet, square feet, cubic feet, pounds — and converts out once. No value is ever chained through a third unit, which is where compounding conversion error comes from.

No dollar figure is ever held as a binary floating point number. Prices are integers of cents; unit rates are held at a thousandth of a cent so that a $/hour figure survives being multiplied by 6.5 hours without drifting.

Rounding happens exactly once per line, at the point where a rate becomes a price, and it rounds half away from zero so that a credit exactly reverses the charge that created it. Section totals are then plain sums of already-rounded lines — which is why the total on screen always equals the numbers above it added by hand.

Where a total has to be split across sections, it is split by largest remainder, so the parts always add back to the whole and no cent is lost or invented.

Bank volume is in-situ material, which is what a survey or a takeoff measures. Loose volume is what it becomes once it is dug and bulked by swell, which is what rides in a truck. Compacted volume is what it measures after it is placed and compacted, which is what a fill drawing specifies.

These are not interchangeable, and the difference is not small. A cut-and-fill balance computed as cut minus fill — the version almost everybody does in their head — ignores that a cubic yard of cut does not make a cubic yard of compacted fill, and can be wrong by a quarter.

Markup is a percentage of cost: sell = cost × (1 + markup). Gross margin is a percentage of price: sell = cost ÷ (1 − margin). A 20% markup earns a 16.7% margin. To earn a 20% margin you have to add 25%.

EARTHVOQ never silently picks one. Wherever a percentage is entered, both readings are available, and the margin displayed is recomputed from the rounded sell price — so it is the margin you will actually earn on the number you send, not the one you asked for before rounding.

There are no default swell factors, no default soil densities, no default production rates, no default equipment or labor rates, and no national average dump fees anywhere in this product.

This is not an omission. Ask five sources for the swell factor of sandy clay and you will get five answers spanning fifteen percentage points; applied to a four thousand yard export, that spread is worth more than the margin on the job. A number that confident and that wrong is more dangerous than a blank field.

So where a value is unknown, the product shows it as absent and says what input would produce it. It never shows a plausible-looking zero, and it never fills a field on your behalf.

No third-party cost data is used in EARTHVOQ today. If any is ever introduced, it will carry its source, its geography, the period it covers and its stated limitations, attached to the figure itself rather than buried in a footer — and it will never be silently substituted for a rate you have entered.

It is not a survey, and it does not know what is under the ground. Rock, groundwater, soft spots, unmarked utilities and over-excavation are outside every calculation here.

It is not a permit. Load counts are volume and weight arithmetic; axle limits, seasonal road postings and haul route restrictions still decide what you can legally move.

Gross margin here is gross. Overhead, bonding, insurance and the cost of money are not in it, so a healthy gross margin is not the same as a profitable company.