Price your first estimate — cost types, assemblies, and the bid

Saturday. Coffee. The set. Nobody in this trade hands off the pricing, and STrOp doesn't ask you to — it takes the arithmetic. An estimate is lines by cost type, priced from rates you set once, rolled up through overhead and margin into a number you can stand behind. Creekside Elementary Bldg C came out to six lines: $140,708 cost, 22.7% gross margin, $182,092 bid. Here's how those six lines got built.

Build the lines

1. Open the pursuit → Estimate.
2. Add lines with the +L +M +E +S +O buttons: Labor, Material, Equipment, Subcontract, Other. The letter is the line's color and its rules — only M lines pick up sales tax, only L lines get the rate picker.
3. Each line carries a quantity, a unit, a unit cost, and its padding — waste and overage as percentages. The full recipe is in How estimate pricing is calculated.

Drop in an assembly

1. +Assy opens the picker. Search assemblies… and pick one — a partition is stud, board, and finish as one priced unit per square foot, each component at its ratio.
2. Enter the takeoff quantity once on the assembly row and the component lines extend from it. Change the square footage and stud, board, and finish all move together.
3. Build an assembly once (Settings → Assemblies) and it's on every estimate after — no re-deriving what a foot of wall costs every Saturday.

Price labor from the agreement

1. On any L line, click CBA. The Labor Rate Picker opens on your Agreement / CBA and the Classification list from your labor rates — each classification shows its loaded rate right in the list.
2. Pick the classification. The breakdown is on screen: base wage, fringe, payroll taxes, workers' comp, GL + small tools, Loaded rate. That's what lands on the line — fringe and all, not a wage somebody remembered.
3. The button goes solid and reads Priced from the agreement, so the next person to open the estimate can see where the rate came from. A Default CBA at the top of the estimate starts every new labor line there.

Read the bottom line

Under the lines: Raw Cost, Sales Tax, Overhead, Gross Margin, Bid Price. Overhead and margin sit on each line as percentages (new lines start from Settings → Estimating Defaults), so a sub line at 5% and a labor line at 12% roll up honestly instead of one blended number hiding the difference. Gross margin is overhead plus profit as a share of the bid — Creekside's 22.7% is $41,384 on $182,092.

The bid price is what the proposal will show. The raw cost is the first budget the job will ever have, set today, months before NTP.

Common mistakes

• Typing a labor rate from memory. The wage you remember is the base. The loaded rate is what you pay once fringe, taxes, comp, and small tools are on it, and the CBA button already knows that. Pick, don't type.
• One overhead number for everything. A subcontract line doesn't cost you what a labor line costs you to carry. Set overhead and margin line by line.
• Treating the bid price as the budget. $182,092 is what Hargrove owes. $140,708 is what the work is supposed to cost. Confuse them and your margin is structurally zero the day you're awarded.

See also

• E5 · Heard about it at the counter
• E7 · The letter the GC actually reads
• How estimate pricing is calculated
• Your estimate is your earliest budget