How to Bid Electrical Jobs That Actually Make Money

Where bids leak money

A bid goes wrong in one of three places: the material was priced from an old number, the hours were optimistic, or the overhead never made it into the rate.

The second and third you can feel. A job runs long and you know it. Overhead you can calculate once and apply.

The first one is invisible. Copper moved, breakers moved, your supplier raised prices in March, and every bid since has been built on February's numbers. Nobody notices a five percent material drift on a single job. Across a year of them, it's the difference between a good year and a flat one.

Start with material you can trust

You cannot bid accurately from prices you're guessing at.

AccuPrice maintains a catalog of 1,400+ electrical items with material costs updated every month. Not quarterly — quarterly is the industry standard and a quarter is long enough for a supplier to raise prices twice.

On top of the catalog sit 1,400+ prebuilt assemblies: panels, conduit runs, spa and mini-split circuits, device and receptacle upgrades. Each one is built from catalog items, which means it reprices itself when the items underneath it move. You don't rebuild anything.

You set the markup, by category if you want. Change it once and every line that depends on it recalculates.

Bid the work the way the work is shaped

Service shops need two pricing modes, and the mistake is picking only one.

Flat rate for the jobs you do constantly. A panel change, a service upgrade, a spa circuit, a fixture swap. One price per task, every tech quoting the same number, nothing to calculate in a customer's driveway. It's faster to sell, easier to train, and easier for the customer to say yes to.

The reason flat rate gets a bad name is prebuilt books priced off national averages. Your supply house and your labor rate aren't averages. On the Flat Rate Pro plan you build your tasks from your own material and labor — unlimited tasks, your rates, your markup — and because they're built from assemblies, they stay current on their own.

Item-level bidding for the jobs that are never the same twice. A tenant improvement with a scope that keeps moving. A service upgrade with a utility coordination problem. Take off the material from the same catalog, apply your labor hours, add overhead and profit.

Same price book, two ways of using it.

Getting your hours right

Material is the number that drifts. Hours are the number people flatter themselves about.

Use what similar jobs actually took, not what they should have taken. If you track job times, three months of data will show you your correction factor.
Count the non-billable time. Drive time, the supply house run, the warranty callback. If your rate assumes eight billable hours and your techs bill five, your rate is a third too low.
Price the access, not just the work. The same panel change takes twice as long in a crawlspace.

Present it so it holds up

A bid that's accurate and badly presented still loses.

Break out material and labor. Two lines instead of one does two jobs: it justifies the number, and when the scope changes, the price change is obvious and easy to defend.

Write the scope down. Most change-order arguments start with something everyone assumed and nobody wrote.

Send it the same day. On service work, speed wins jobs. A bid on Tuesday beats a better bid on Friday more often than anyone wants to admit.

Keep the format consistent. When your quotes look the same every time, they look like a company's quotes rather than a person's.

Keep the numbers where your team already works

AccuPrice doesn't replace your CRM and doesn't ask your techs to learn anything new.

Direct sync into QuickBooks Online and Jobber
CSV export and bulk import into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Workiz, ServiceM8, Service Fusion, or any CRM that takes an import
FieldEdge through QuickBooks

Your techs keep quoting and invoicing where they always have. The prices behind them just stop being out of date.

Frequently asked questions

How do I stop underbidding jobs?

Two fixes. Price material from a catalog that gets updated rather than from memory, and check your estimated hours against actual hours for three months to find out how far off you run.

Should I bid flat rate or itemized?

Flat rate for repeatable service work, itemized for jobs that are never the same twice. Most shops need both.

How often do material prices need updating?

Monthly. A quarter is long enough for a supplier to raise prices twice.

Do I have to change software to use AccuPrice?

No. It syncs directly into QuickBooks Online and Jobber, and exports by CSV to other CRMs.

What's included at each plan level?

The material catalog and monthly updates are on every plan. Assemblies and the 75 prebuilt labor services start at Price Book Pro. The custom flat rate book builder is on Flat Rate Pro.

Bid from numbers that are current, not from last spring's.

See plans →