Electrical proposals and quotes, built from the bid and approved online.

What an electrical customer actually needs to see

A homeowner and a general contractor read the same bid differently. The homeowner wants to see their house: what goes in the kitchen, what goes in the garage, what each room costs. The GC wants your scope, your exclusions and one number they can carry into their own bid. BidGlory produces both from the same bid, by switching what the proposal shows rather than writing a second document:

• Rooms or totals only. Group the proposal by room with area totals, or print totals only, with no rooms at all.
• Line prices on or off. Show every line’s price, or show the scope and the total.
• Labor by phase. Break labor out by rough-in, trim and finish when the customer wants to see where the hours go.
• Product detail. Manufacturer, model, features, product images and a per-system summary page, when the fixtures are part of the sale.
• Opening and closing documents. A cover page, plus Word documents placed before and after the line items: a cover letter up front, your terms, scope and acceptance at the back. The payment schedule prints in the closing documents that carry it.

A proposal can also be filtered to a single labor phase, which turns the same bid into, say, a rough-in scope document. Styles include Standard, Narrow and Executive. Whatever you choose, you download it as Word or PDF.

One number, everywhere

The commonest proposal error is not a typo; it is a total that was copied from the estimate and then not updated when the estimate changed. In BidGlory the proposal totals — equipment, cable and hardware, programming, installation, design, shipping, tax, labor tax, GST, discount and grand total — come from the same pricing engine as the bid grid. The visible rows add up to the grand total. If you want to know how those numbers are built, the electrical pricing page walks through it.

Options without a second bid

Electrical upgrades sell better as a choice than as an argument: standard fixtures or upgraded ones, a basic lighting package or one with dimming. Group alternatives into an option set marked Good, Better and Best, and the proposal presents them side by side, labelled by tier. When the customer decides, you record the pick, and the other tiers drop off the proposal.

Separately, any line can be marked optional — a surge protector, an EV charger circuit, an extra exterior circuit. Optional lines are quoted but kept out of the grand total, and the proposal can print an optional total beside it, so nobody has to add it up in the margin.

A payment schedule that matches the job

Electrical work is paid in stages because it is installed in stages. A payment plan has up to five installments plus a final payment, each a whole percentage of the grand total; the final payment is whatever is left, so the plan always adds up to 100%. The rows show due dates or, with the plan’s status switch on, a short status such as “deposit on signing” or “at rough-in inspection”. The amounts are recalculated from the current total every time the proposal prints, so a revised bid never carries last week’s deposit figure.

Sending it and getting it approved

Create a share link for the bid, add a note for the customer if you want one, and email it from BidGlory or send it yourself. The customer opens a plain page with your note and the proposal as a PDF, types their full name, ticks a consent box and approves. They do not need an account.

At that moment BidGlory records the signer’s name, their email if they gave it, their IP address and browser, the consent text they agreed to, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the proposal PDF as generated at the moment of approval. The bid is marked sold in the same step, and if outgoing email is set up, your office is notified. If a dispute comes up later, you have a record of who approved, from where and when. Whether a typed-name approval satisfies your contracts is a question for your lawyer; what BidGlory gives you is the record.

Customers you work with repeatedly can have a portal login instead: they see their proposals laid out room by room, see whether each is pending or approved, and comment on the bid. Comments stay with the bid rather than in someone’s inbox.

Change orders

BidGlory does not have a separate change-order document type, and it is better to say so than to let you find out. What it does have covers most changes: save a version of the bid the customer signed, make the change, and compare the two versions line by line to see exactly what moved. Then send the revised proposal on a new link. The customer approves the new document, and that approval is recorded on its own with its own fingerprint, so you hold a record of both approvals. If your contracts call for a numbered change-order form, keep that form in your template set or your existing process.

Drafting the words, with a human gate

If you connect a language model, BidGlory can draft the cover letter, scope of work and install notes from the bid’s contents. Export is blocked until a person has reviewed the AI-written text, so a draft never reaches a customer unread. Without a model configured, the AI panels simply stay quiet; see how the AI features work.