Price every bid from your real costs

Bit & Grain now has a Bid Calculator built into the estimate builder, so your price starts from what the job actually costs you.

Open a new estimate and the Bid Calculator sits right above the line items. Enter your materials with sales tax, dump fees, travel, and labor by person: your team members, your subcontractors, and a new Crew list for the cash helpers who do not need a login, each carrying their own hourly or daily cost rate. As you type, it shows total job cost, a suggested price from your markup, expected profit, gross margin, and a plain health read on whether the bid is Strong, In the zone, or Below target against the margin band you set for yourself. Markup comes from tiers you control, small jobs marked up harder than big ones, picked automatically by job size and changeable on any bid. When the numbers look right, one press proposes the customer-facing lines for the estimate, a work line and a labor line priced to your bid, and your internal costs never appear on anything a client sees. Before this, the math lived on a legal pad or in a spreadsheet, and the estimate only ever knew the price, not the cost.

Save the bid and the cost follows the work: the job carries your estimated cost, so the P&L tab and the Profitability report show estimated against actual instead of a blank. Labor got the same honesty pass. You can add labor to a job's Time tab by hand, pick the worker and the hours or days, no timer required, and the invoice builder gets an Add billable labor button that prices labor at your billable rate. Say a bathroom remodel comes in: materials run $4,800 with tax, your lead is on it three days at $400 a day with a helper at $200, the calculator suggests about $10,600 at your medium-tier markup, and the health pill reads In the zone. You press Propose customer lines and send it.

You will find it on any new or edited estimate, above Line Items; your markup tiers and target margin live under Settings, then Business, and the Crew list under Settings, then Crew. Here's how to start: put cost rates on your team, subs, and crew, then build your next estimate through the calculator instead of around it. It's available on every plan.