Electrical pricing software that shows the margin before the customer sees the price.

Markup is not margin, and the gap is your profit

Take a fixture that costs you $40.00. Put a 35% markup on it and you sell it for $54.00 — but the $14.00 you made is only 25.9% of the selling price. If you meant a 35% margin, the price has to be $61.54, which is a 53.8% markup. On one fixture the difference is $7.54. Across a job’s material it is the difference between the margin you planned and the one you get.

BidGlory shows margin percent and markup percent next to each other on every line, computed from the line’s cost and its sell price. You decide which number your shop runs on; the tool just stops you from confusing them.

Where the material number comes from

Each catalog product carries its model, manufacturer, manufacturer number, unit type, unit cost and sell price. A product can list more than one supplier, each with its own cost; mark one as preferred and that cost is the one a new bid line picks up. Quantities are decimals, so wire by the foot prices the same way as a device by the each.

What BidGlory does not do is fetch prices for you. There is no subscription price database and no live distributor feed. Costs get into the catalog three ways: typed on the product, pasted in from a spreadsheet (a header row and data rows, with a preview that separates new products from duplicates), or carried over with a BidMagic database. Keeping copper and fixture prices current is your job. In exchange, a price only changes when you change it: once a line is on a bid, its price is stored with the bid, so editing the catalog tomorrow does not change a proposal you sent today. Reusing an old bid is covered on the electrical bidding page.

Price levels and client pricing

A price level is a multiplier with a name: 1.10 for a builder who always wants changes turned around in a day, 0.95 for a repeat GC. You keep a list of them and apply one to a bid, choosing whether it multiplies the unit cost or the sell price. Every line has its own price-level box, so owner-supplied fixtures or pass-through items can stay out of it. Turning a level on for a saved bid asks first, and only the lines whose box is ticked are repriced.

Clients can carry default pricing: an equipment tax rate, labor tax on or off or VAT/GST, tax on cost basis, a price level and a design rate. A new bid for that client starts from those terms instead of your company defaults, and after saving a new bid you can make its pricing the client’s default.

Labor and the bid-level adjustments

Labor sits on every line in phase columns — Prewire (rough-in), Trim, Finish and Install, plus any phases you add — and the bid summary shows rough-in, trim, finish and install on separate rows. Beside them are plus-or-minus adjustments for cable and hardware, programming, install and shipping. That is where a job-level judgment belongs: a difficult attic, a second mobilisation, a shorter schedule. It changes the total without pretending forty individual lines got harder.

Design is a percentage of equipment, labor and cable, so a design fee scales with the job rather than being typed in once and forgotten when the scope grows.

Tax, the part that quietly eats margin

• Sales tax and labor tax. Equipment is taxed at the bid’s rate; labor tax is on or off per bid or per client.
• VAT/HST (GST). On a GST bid, GST replaces sales tax and labor tax. It is never added on top of them.
• Tax on cost basis. For use-tax situations, material can be taxed on its cost rather than on its sell price.
• What else is taxable. Cable and hardware, discounts, programming, design and shipping each have their own taxable switch.

BidGlory applies the rules you set; it does not decide what is taxable in your state. Get that from your accountant once, configure it, and every bid follows it.