Set up your rate card so every bid uses your numbers

This is the most important setup you'll do in BidCraft. Without your numbers, every proposal is a guess. With them, the AI does the typing and your rate card does the pricing.

If you answered the pricing questions in the setup quiz when you signed up, a lot of this is already filled in. Use this tutorial to check it and tune it.

Not sure what your numbers should be? Read how to price a shower remodel using your own numbers first. It walks through building an all-in crew-day rate with worked examples.

The steps

1. Open Pricing templates

In the menu, under How you bid, open Pricing templates.

How you charge is laid out as tiles. Tap a tile to open its editor, and each one has its own save button.

2. Set your day rate

Tap the Day rate tile. In Your day rate, enter what you charge for one crew day, all in, with your overhead and profit already inside it.

This is the one people get wrong. Your day rate is what you charge, not what a day of your crew costs. BidCraft doesn't add overhead or profit on top of it, so if you enter your cost, every bid comes out at cost.

There's a separate box for What a crew day costs you (wages, taxes, the truck). It's optional. BidCraft uses it for cost pages and margins, never for prices. Leave it blank and BidCraft estimates it.

Tap Save day rate.

3. Choose how you price jobs

If the same panel shows How do you price jobs?, pick one:

• My service rates: your catalog prices and square-foot rates price the work. Anything without its own price uses your day rate.
• By the day: every labor line is days times your crew's day rate. Add-ons keep their set prices, and permits and fees stay at cost.

This is your starting point for every new job. Any single job can switch.

If you don't see that question, nothing to do here: BidCraft prices from your service rates and uses your day rate for anything without its own price.

4. Put your prices on the services you sell

Open Catalog → Services. This is the menu of work you sell: demo, prep, wall tile, floors, niches, benches, trim and so on.

Open each service you use and set:

• How it's priced: per square foot, per linear foot, each, flat for the job, by the day, or at cost for pass-through items like permits.
• Your price for that unit.

Niches, benches and other add-ons usually work best as a set price each. When a bid uses one of these services, it gets your price.

5. Set materials and tile

Back on Pricing templates:

• Tap Materials and answer how you charge for setting materials: Included in my prices, Billed at cost or Billed with a markup. Tap Save materials.
• Tap Tile and answer Who buys the tile? A job can still change it for itself. Tap Save tile.

6. Set your minimum and margin goal

• Minimum: the smallest job you'll take, in dollars. No bid goes under it. Tap Save minimum.
• Margin goal: your overhead and profit as percentages. BidCraft checks your bids against this goal and flags lines that come in under it. It's never added on top of your prices. Tap Save margin goal.
• Difficulty multiplier (optional): how much longer harder tile takes to set, by size, material and pattern. If you don't charge more for a slow pattern or a big format, leave it at the defaults and come back later.

7. Add your pricing rules in plain English

Tap Pricing rules, then + Add a rule. Write the rules you always follow, one per line, the way you'd say them:

Client supplies the tile on most jobs.

Always add a haul-away line on full bathroom remodels.

Biddy follows these on the lines it prices. A price already set on a line isn't changed by a rule. Tap Save rules.

You can also just tell Biddy a rule while you're working on a bid, and it offers to save it for you.

8. Check it on a real bid

Pick a job you've already priced by hand and build it in BidCraft. Compare the totals line by line.

Where they disagree, figure out why and fix the setting, not just that one bid. A wrong rate fixed once is fixed on every bid after it.

Your numbers always win

Here's the order BidCraft trusts, from the top: a price you type on a line, then your service prices, then your day rate times the days, then the AI's estimate. The AI fills gaps. It never overrules you.

Not on BidCraft yet? Start the 14-day free trial (card required) on the pricing page. Every plan includes the Growth Community, where you can ask other tile pros how they set up their rates on the Tuesday BidCraft call.