Handbook / Winning the work
Estimates and pricing
Priced line by line, with what it costs you tracked alongside what the client pays.
Every line on an estimate carries two numbers: unit cost, which is what it costs the company, and unit price, which is what the client is charged. Keeping both is what makes margin real rather than a guess at the end.
Two ways to price a line
Type the sell price directly, if that is how you think. Or type the cost and the margin you want on it, and the price is worked out - 62 an hour at 58% comes out at 97.96. Because the price is derived, the two can never drift apart, and repricing a whole trade is one number instead of forty.
A line that costs money and sells for nothing is an error, not a blank. It is flagged on the estimate in red, and any proposal built on it refuses to send until it is fixed. This is the single easiest way for a company to do work for free, and the software will not let it through quietly.
Selling a line for less than it costs is a warning rather than a block - sometimes that is deliberate, a loss leader or a goodwill line - but it is said out loud.
On top of the lines
| Line | What it is | How it is worked out |
|---|---|---|
| Subtotal | The priced lines added up | Σ qty × unit price |
| Overhead & profit | Company markup on the priced work | subtotal × markup % |
| Contingency | Cover for the unknown | (subtotal + O&P) × contingency % |
| Discount | A figure you have chosen to come off | subtracted |
| Tax | Applied only to the taxable share | taxable base × rate |
| Internal cost | What it costs you, kept out of the client copy | Σ qty × unit cost |
| Margin | What the job earns as a percentage | (total − tax − cost) ÷ (total − tax) |
The price book is where recurring items live with their own cost and price. Pulling a line from it fills both numbers and the cost code in one action, which is how an estimate gets built in twenty minutes rather than an afternoon.
Cost codes are the spine of everything
downstream. A line coded 06-100 Rough carpentry here is
what makes the budget, the purchase orders, the crew's hours and the
final job-cost report all line up without anybody mapping between two
schemes.
An estimate
Eleanor's kitchen was priced at $117,246 against sixteen lines, at 18% overhead and profit with 5% contingency, and a 45% margin. The cabinetry allowance, the quartz and the appliance figure are all separate lines so a change to any of them is visible.
Open estimatesUndoing things
| What happened | The way back |
|---|---|
| A line priced wrong | Edit the estimate. Any proposal built on it follows the new number automatically - until the client has signed. |
| Repricing after the client accepted | The estimate refuses line changes once accepted. Duplicate it as a revision and price the revision. |
| Deleting an estimate a proposal was built from | Refused. Delete the proposal first, then the estimate. |
| Sent to the wrong client | Change the client and send again - the share link stays the same document, so the old link keeps working. If that matters, duplicate instead. |
Access: Estimators and above. Seeing cost and margin needs the same permission as creating them.