Contractor Estimating & Job-Profit System

Most small contractors price from memory and a calculator, then find out at the end of the job whether it made money. Overhead never gets charged to the job, labor burden gets forgotten, and a 20% markup quietly turns into a 16% margin. One under-bid month can erase a quarter of profit.

This workbook carries your numbers from takeoff to a signed proposal in one file. The Setup tab holds your business info and defaults: labor burden, sales tax, default crew rate, markup, target margin, and monthly overhead divided by billable crew-hours. Three cost tabs take the job itself: 20 material lines with quantity and unit cost plus tax, 15 labor tasks with crew size, hours, and a rate that falls back to your default and adds burden automatically, and 12 equipment or subcontractor lines. The Overhead & Markup tab totals direct cost, applies overhead per labor hour, and shows two suggested prices, one by markup and one by target margin. The Job Profit Dashboard takes the bid you actually choose and returns gross profit, gross margin, markup over cost, and profit per labor hour. The Client Proposal tab pulls your business details and the total, adds a deposit split, and prints clean. A Cost Library lists 32 reference line items across seven trade groups (concrete, framing, drywall, paint, flooring, roofing, and mechanical subs) with blank unit-cost cells for your local prices. 68 formulas in total, no sample data, no macros.

The first 15 minutes: fill the Setup tab once with your rates and overhead, enter a job you already bid into the three cost tabs, then read the Dashboard to see whether that bid actually hit your target margin. From then on every estimate starts from the same defaults, and the proposal is ready the moment the numbers are.