BidRight Estimator
The practical estimating toolkit that helps small contractors calculate true costs, protect their margin, catch missing scope, and pressure-test a bid before it leaves their hands. Because winning the bid and winning a profitable job are two different events.
Know your true cost. Protect your margin. Catch what's missing before you send the bid.
It's forgetting something that should have been in the math. And on a business where the average remodeler kept a 6.3% net profit margin in 2024 — their best result in over two decades — a single $2,000 omission on a $100,000 job takes roughly a third of the profit.
Labor hours estimated by feel, then blown through by week three
Payroll burden never added — the biggest silent gap in small-contractor estimating
Material waste, delivery and dump fees quietly absorbed
A supplier quote that expired two weeks before the job started
Overhead never allocated, so the job pays no rent, insurance or admin
Contingency treated as profit — and then spent on the first surprise
A 20% markup applied in the belief it produces a 20% margin. It produces 16.7%
A subcontractor quote assumed complete, until you read what it excluded
Mobilization, site protection and the punch-list return trip never priced
A price set against what a competitor bid instead of what the job costs
No structured review before the proposal goes out at 11pm
You find out in week five, not week one
“Every missed labor hour, forgotten delivery charge, outdated material price and unallocated overhead expense quietly reduces the profit on a project — and you almost never find out until the job is half done.”
Margin figure: National Association of Home Builders, Remodelers' Cost of Doing Business Study, 2026 edition (fiscal year 2024 data). Self-reported by NAHB member remodelers; sample size not publicly disclosed. Every other figure on this page is identified where it appears.
Estimating accuracy stopped being a matter of professional tidiness some time ago. Three numbers explain why.
Average net profit margin for residential remodeling companies in fiscal 2024 — and NAHB noted it was the strongest result in over two decades. That's the number in the good years, which is what makes every omission expensive.
Construction input prices rose 8.4% in the twelve months to May 2026 — the steepest since 2021 — while contractors' bid prices rose 3.5%. AGC's own framing: contractors' margins are being squeezed. That gap gets absorbed somewhere.
Share of specialty trade contractors who said they had completed change-order work, billed it, and then written it off as bad debt. A change order is a far weaker instrument for recovering money than a line in the original estimate.
Sources: NAHB Remodelers' Cost of Doing Business Study, 2026 edition (FY2024). Associated General Contractors of America analysis of BLS Producer Price Index data, 11 June 2026 — the bid-price index covers new nonresidential building construction. Dodge Construction Network, Optimizing the Change Order Process, June 2026, produced with Clearstory — vendor-sponsored research, sample size not publicly disclosed. These describe the market, not a prediction for your business.
Not an estimating ebook. A working system. You open the workbook, enter your scope, and it carries you from labor hours to a defensible bid price — then tells you, before you send it, what's missing and what could make the margin disappear.
Everything a small contractor needs to go from project scope to a bid price they can defend — and a written record of what that price assumes. Built for general contractors, remodelers, subcontractors and owner-operators alike.
Get Instant Access — $12.99Numbered so a contractor who has never used an estimating system never has to wonder what to open next.
The twelve steps, with the minutes each one takes and the tab it happens on. Start here.
Blank and reusable. Every formula built in, every input cell marked, a Read Me tab, and cell notes explaining each assumption.
The same workbook, filled in end to end for a real-shaped 7-week kitchen and main-floor renovation. Change a cell and watch the answer move.
The standalone quick calculator: nine inputs to a bid price, plus a two-way markup ↔ margin converter and a cost-sensitivity table.
20 chapters, 10 charts and diagrams, a full worked example, 8 worksheets and 5 appendices. Supplied in both PDF and Word.
Eight stages, formatted to print, with a Y/N/N-A column and a notes column for the question you'll be asked in three weeks.
Seventy fill-in-the-blank prompts across scope and takeoff, labor, materials, subcontractors, overhead and markup, risk and bid/no-bid, proposals and change orders, and final self-review — with a clear note on what an AI assistant must never be allowed to do.
You type into the yellow cells. Everything else calculates, checks itself, and tells you what it found.
Figures from the completed sample workbook included in the toolkit. Illustrative — your numbers will differ.
Warnings are review prompts generated from your own entries, not industry judgements.
No Estimating Software or Subscription Needed
Every Formula Written Out and Worked Through
Works for GCs, Remodelers and Subcontractors Alike
Every Statistic Sourced, Dated and Caveated
No Promise of a Profitable Job or a Winning Bid
Nothing Hard-Coded — Every Rate Is Yours to Set
A Full Worked Example You Can Open and Change
One-Time Purchase, Reusable on Every Bid
Instant Download After Checkout
Trade-flexible by design. The costing chain is the same whether you swing the hammer or coordinate the people who do.
Does every estimate personally, at night. Needs speed and a system that does the remembering.
Has employees now and needs every estimate to come out the same way regardless of who built it.
Prices trade-specific work and gets asked to quote far more of it than they can take on.
Coordinates several trades and needs visibility into total project cost, not four separate numbers.
Needs a structured file to work in, so the estimate can be checked by someone else before it goes.
And considerably less than the payroll burden most contractors leave out of a single estimate.
One-time payment · 7 files · Instant download · No subscription
Get BidRight Estimator — $12.99The individual amounts above are our own estimated standalone values for each component, shown to explain how the toolkit is composed. They are not objective market prices, not a comparison with any named competitor's product, and nothing was ever sold separately at those prices. The only price that applies is $67.
A seven-week kitchen and main-floor renovation carried from scope register to submitted bid — 18 scope lines, 12 labor tasks, 11 material lines, 4 subcontractors, and every warning the system raises along the way.
Every calculation in the system on one printable page — burden, waste, overhead recovery, contingency, break-even, and both markup ↔ margin conversions.
Twenty-three ready-to-use cost codes for small residential and light-commercial work, so this year's numbers are comparable with last year's.
The scope walk, labor sanity check, material price risk log, sub quote review, overhead inventory, break-even card, post-job reconciliation and the conditions sheet.
A day-by-day rollout: set up in week one, run in parallel for three weeks, switch over, then calibrate from your own completed-job data.
Every statistic used, with its source, date and limitation — plus two figures the industry quotes constantly that do not survive checking, and why.
This is a newly released title, so there are no customer reviews yet — and we would rather show you an honest empty space than invent one. Reviews from early readers will appear here as they arrive.
Your review could be here. Run a real bid through it and tell us what the error detector caught.
Your review could be here. Run a real bid through it and tell us what the error detector caught.
Your review could be here. Run a real bid through it and tell us what the error detector caught.
If the file you receive is genuinely defective or doesn't match this description, request a refund within 7 days of purchase. Because this is instant digital delivery, please review the full details on our refund policy page before buying.
Know your true project cost, protect your target margin, catch missing scope, stop confusing markup with profit, and pressure-test the bid before it leaves your hands.
Get BidRight Estimator — $12.99