Building a Bid
Linking item sheets, organizing sections, applying markup, and balancing your number.
Linking Item Sheets to the Bid→
How to add priced item sheets to your bid, how linking differs from a write-in row, and what carries over.
Organizing Your Bid with Sections→
How to use section headers and subtotal rows to group, label, and subtotal your bid.
Importing a Pay-Item Schedule→
How to bring a DOT or AASHTOWare pay-item schedule into your bid as unpriced rows, mapping the file's columns to item number, description, unit, and quantity.
Write-In Line Items→
What write-in rows are, how to add and fill them in, and when to use one instead of building a full item sheet.
Understanding Markup: Category Markup, Overhead, and Profit→
The concepts behind markup, including direct cost, category markup, overhead, and profit, and how they combine to turn your cost into a price.
Applying Markup to Your Bid→
Where to set your markup percentages, what each type of markup does, and how the panel shows direct cost becoming the final bid price.
Using the Markup Simulator→
How to open the Markup Simulator, try markup changes with its sliders and Target Bid Solver, read the Live Preview, and apply or discard what you test.
Bid Balancing and How It Works→
Why your bid total and your marked-up target can drift apart, what Auto-Balance does about it, and what to watch for.
Auto-Balancing Your Bid→
How the Auto-balance bid units button re-spreads drift back across your line items so the Actual Bid lands on the Balanced Bid.
Moving Money Between Bid Items→
How to use Move Money to shift dollars between bid items without changing the bid total, why estimators unbalance a bid, and how transfers are tracked.
Bidding Alternates and Allowances→
How to assign bid items to alternate groups so their dollars move in and out of the base bid, and how alternates appear in the client report.
Working with Scenarios→
How to fork the whole estimate into a scenario, explore a what-if, compare it against the base, and merge or discard it.