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EARTHVOQ

[ Excavation bidding ]

From cost to a bid you can stand behind

Working out what a job costs is one problem. Deciding what to charge for it is a different one, and it is where most of the money is won or lost. EARTHVOQ keeps the two apart and shows you the arithmetic between them.
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14 days. No card.

Bid build-upRiverside Commons
Direct cost$284,000
add overhead recovery
Overhead @ 15%$42,600
below this the job loses money
Breakeven$326,600
apply 20% target margin
Bid price$0

Gross margin 30.4% · profit after overhead 20.0% · markup on breakeven 25.0%

Cost is not a price

Three numbers get confused constantly, and each of them is right about something different. EARTHVOQ prints all three rather than picking one and hoping you meant it.

Margin

Profit as a share of the price. $408,250 against $326,600 of breakeven is a 20% margin.

Markup

The same money as a share of the cost. The same job is a 25% markup — and this is the number most contractors mean when they say “I add 25”.

The gap

Adding 20% to cost when you meant a 20% margin leaves $16,300 on this job. Do it all year and it is a truck.

Gross margin is not profit

Gross margin funds the office before it funds anything else. A bid at 22% gross against an 18% overhead rate is a 4% job, and it looks healthy right up until the year ends.
The same bid, read two waysOverhead 15%

Gross margin

30.4%

Price less direct cost

Overhead recovered

$42,600

Profit after overhead

20.0%

Below breakeven at

$326,600

The floor

The overhead rate comes from your own annual figures, worked out inside the product. EARTHVOQ will not supply one — a published range would be somebody else’s company.

The proposal the customer sees

  1. 01

    Scope in your words

    Inclusions, exclusions and terms you wrote once and reuse — EARTHVOQ ships none of them, because standard terms would be legal advice wearing a default.

  2. 02

    Priced as you choose

    Lump sum, by section, or itemised. What the customer sees is a decision, not a export format.

  3. 03

    A PDF, not a screenshot

    Your company details, the scope, the price. Your costs and your margin are not on it.

  4. 04

    Sent, and then fixed

    The version you sent is frozen. A revision is a new version — an issued proposal is never edited underneath a customer.

Won, lost, and what the difference looked like

Once you have decided a few bids, EARTHVOQ can count them — read from the version that was actually sent, not the one that stands today.
Decided bidsBy margin band

Under 10%no decided bids

10–18%6 bids, 4 won

18–25%5 bids, 2 won

25% and above3 bids, 1 won

That is a count of what happened. EARTHVOQ will not tell you the margin is why a bid was won or lost — the low-margin bids may simply have been the competitive ones. The pattern is yours to read. More on what your history can and cannot say.

Related EARTHVOQ capabilities

Price your next bid twice — your way and this way — and compare.

The margin arithmetic takes a minute and usually surprises somebody. Fourteen days, no card.
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14 days, no card. Plans from $79 a month.