How job type templates work

Job type templates are your saved "shape" for each project type — how many lines a Shower Remodel usually has, what order they go in, the scope language you trust. The first time you sign a Shower Remodel proposal, BidCraft quietly starts using its composition as the template for your next shower. When you want to make it definitive, hit Save as Template on the proposal page. The AI mirrors your granularity — lump-sum stays lump-sum, itemized stays itemized.

You'll find your templates on Settings → Pricing templates, in the Your job types section below the How you charge tiles. Each job type is a card showing its name, a short description, how many lines it has, and how many times it's been used. A card that isn't yours yet carries a small chip: Starter (BidCraft's starter lines), Using defaults (set up, but no lines of your own yet) or None yet (no custom job types). Your own templates carry no chip. Open a card to open that template.

Your catalog starts empty — and that's the point

New accounts start with no templates of their own in Your job types. The category grid is filtered to match the trades you picked at signup — so a shower-and-bath contractor sees Shower Remodel, Full Bath, Tub-to-Shower, and the like up front, not a wall of every project type. Need more? Hit Add more project types to reveal the full set. (Trades that don't have a starter category — plumbing, electrical, countertops, and the like — point you at Generate a template to build one from scratch.)

Add a job type with the + Add a job type button at the right of the Your job types heading, or the dashed + Add a job type card at the end of the grid. Both open the same short menu: Start from scratch (name it, then add your own lines), Generate with Biddy, Browse starters, Import a pack, or From a past proposal (upload a PDF or photo of one you've sent). The Set up my templates button in Biddy's welcome tour lands you on the same spot. The main ways in:

• Generate with Biddy — pick a project type (or type your own, like Sauna floor) and BidCraft drafts the line items for you. Here's the good part: the more templates you have, the more each new one sounds like you. BidCraft reads your existing templates — your naming, your granularity, your line structure — and matches that style on the next generate. The first one's a solid start; every one after learns from the ones you keep.

• Browse starters — install BidCraft's proven starters for common jobs (Shower Remodel, Full Bath, Tub-to-Shower Conversion, Tile Floors, and more) in Simple or Detailed, and pick just the categories you want:

  • Simple — a handful of surface-level lines a homeowner reads easily (for a shower: Shower demo & haul-away, Shower walls, Shower floor & pan, Fixtures & trim). This is how most contractors quote.
  • Detailed — the same work broken out step by step (demo → plumbing → substrate & waterproofing → wall tile → floor tile → grout, seal & trim).

  Starters arrive fully editable and carry the same materials and tasks under the hood, so your costs and checklists come out right either way. The Simple/Detailed toggle pre-picks whichever style you chose at signup. Once you tweak a starter, it counts as yours.

• Import a pack — got a template pack file from a webinar or another contractor? Import it and the templates land ready to edit.

And if a generated or installed line item still isn't how you'd write it, just tell Biddy to fix it.

Generate it with Biddy instead

Prefer a conversation? Open Biddy on the Pricing templates page and talk it through — whether you name lines by room, offer tiers, keep it simple or itemized — before you hit Generate, so your very first template already sounds like you.

Custom project types

Not every job fits a standard category. When you generate, pick Something else… and type the job — Sauna floor, Pool deck, Steam room. It gets saved under Custom projects in Your job types, and you can make as many as you need. Each opens in the full editor just like a standard template.

Share templates as a pack

Built a set of templates you're proud of? On the Pricing templates page, open Import a pack and use the export panel to bundle the ones you pick into a single file (no prices, no account details — just the line shapes, materials roles, and tasks). Hand it to another contractor, or import a pack someone shares with you. Imported templates come in ready to edit.

How the system learns from you

Sign your first Shower Remodel proposal with one combined line item, and the next Shower Remodel you generate comes back with one combined line item. Sign one with twelve itemized lines and the next one comes back itemized. You don't have to save anything — BidCraft watches your signed work and quietly uses your most recent signed proposal of that type as the starting shape.

Saving a proposal as your template

Once you've cleaned up a proposal — adjusted the lines, rewritten a scope blurb, set the order the way you want it — you can lock it in as the definitive template for that project type. On the proposal page, open the ··· menu on the proposal bar and pick Save as template. It's there on every generated proposal; you don't need to classify the project up front.

When you tap it, the modal leads with a Project type picker. Pick the type (or leave the project's existing type pre-selected), and we'll save the template under that category. If the project didn't have a type yet, we also stamp the chosen type onto the project so future scope drafts use the same template.

What gets captured: line items, the order they're in, the scope language, each line's materials, each line's tasks — including any freeform lines you've added yourself and any hand-added materials or tasks on top of the linked service's recipe. The goal is that nothing you've built up on this proposal gets lost when it becomes a template. Pass-through fees (permits, dump charges) are the only thing skipped, because they're project-specific.

Crew-days come along too: each crew-days line saves the number of days you landed on, so the next proposal from this template starts from that estimate instead of a cold guess.

Setting how long each line takes

Open a template (Settings → Pricing templates → [Your job type]) and click a line. In the line editor, a line priced By the day takes its crew days right in the Pricing tab. A Per sq ft or Per lin ft line has an optional "Your crew does about ___ a day" box for the schedule. BidCraft starts every proposal from your number and only adjusts it for the specifics of each job.

If you already have a template for that project type, saving replaces it — but your previous version doesn't disappear. We keep your last 5 versions automatically; see Rolling back to a previous version below.

Rolling back to a previous version

Visit Settings → Pricing templates → [Your job type]. Below the line editor you'll see a Previous versions card (only appears when you have history). Each archived version shows the date it was archived and how many lines it had, with a Restore button. One tap restores it as the active template — and the version that WAS active gets archived in turn, so the swap is reversible.

Five is the cap. Saving a sixth time drops the oldest archive.

Saving services from a proposal also builds the template

When you use the Save these line items as services panel on a generated proposal, those services don't just land in your catalog — they also populate the matching project category's template if you don't have one yet. The catalog and the template grow together as a byproduct of your normal work. You wire up your services once, on a real job, and the next proposal of that type starts from the shape you just built.

Seeding a template from a past proposal

Don't have the shape in BidCraft yet? Start from a proposal you already sent. Upload a past proposal (PDF or photo) and you land on the review screen — see Reviewing uploaded proposals for the walkthrough. On the second step of that review there's a Start a template from this toggle. Leave it on, save, and BidCraft offers to turn that proposal's line items — in order, with your scope wording — into the template for that project type. It's the fastest way to seed a template from work you're proud of.

You can kick this off two ways:

• From the Pricing templates page — hit Add template from proposal, upload one, and you'll land on the review screen with the template step ready to go.
• From a services upload — when you upload past proposals to build your service catalog (Catalog → Services → Add Services → Past proposals), the same review offers the template toggle at the end. You add services AND save a template from the same upload — they work side by side.

If the batch has more than one proposal, you choose which one best represents the type. Lines that match a service already in your catalog get linked automatically; the rest come in as plain lines you can wire up later. Materials and tasks aren't pulled from the PDF — add those afterward from your services or with Biddy. Saving over an existing template keeps your last 5 versions, same as everywhere else.

Read them again. If you uploaded proposals a while back, the review screen may show a note that they were read with an older reader, along with a Read them again button. Biddy has gotten better at reading proposals that price by the room — one number for the whole bathroom, with the work listed underneath — and at telling the difference between the tile a client picked for one job and a service you actually sell. Hit it and your files get read again with everything we've learned since. Nothing is thrown away: your uploads stay where they are, and you still review and approve everything before it lands in your catalog.

How template lines become services

A line's price lives in your catalog, as a service. When you set a price on a line that doesn't have one yet and hit Save line, BidCraft adds it to your catalog (named after the line, with its materials and tasks) and links the line to it. That's the price your bids use. There's no separate step to "promote" a line any more.

Lines saved from a real proposal (Save these line items as services, or Save as template) get linked the same way.

Editing templates directly

You don't need a real proposal to refine a template. Go to Settings → Pricing templates, open the job type's card under Your job types, and edit it directly. This is the right move when you want to add a line you usually forget, rewrite a scope blurb so it reads tighter, or reorder things without doing it through a real job.

The header on the editor page is editable too — both the template name (renaming it for your own clarity) and the description (a sentence or two explaining what this template covers). Leave the description blank to inherit BidCraft's default. The name and description never appear on the proposal your client sees.

Set the schedule once

Every project template now has a Schedule tab, right next to Lines. This is where you tell BidCraft how a job like this actually flows day to day — demo first, then waterproofing, then tile, then grout and cleanup — so that once, and every future job of this type shows up with a real day-by-day plan instead of a flat task list.

The first time you open the Schedule tab, it's empty. Hit Build starting layout and BidCraft lays out a first draft from your template's lines and their tasks — one bar per task, grouped into phases, roughly in the order your lines already run. It's a starting point, not a finished plan, so don't worry about getting it perfect on the first pass.

From there, everything is drag-and-drop:

• Drag a bar left or right to change when a task starts. Drop it and it sticks — reload the page and it's still there.
• Drag the right edge of a bar to make a task longer or shorter. Bars that haven't been resized yet show a dashed edge — that means BidCraft is auto-sizing the length from how many hours the task usually takes (and how many crew you've got on it). Grab the edge and set your own length, and the dashed edge turns solid.
• Check off dependencies on a task (open it by tapping the bar) so it can't start before another task finishes — tile can't start before waterproofing is done, that kind of thing. If moving a bar would start it before a task it depends on, it snaps to the earliest honest start date instead and lets you know why.
• Set crew role on a task (Tile Setter, Plumber, Helper, whatever fits) so the plan reads like a real job board.
• Type in a sample square footage using the "Preview at a sample job size" panel to see how the auto-sized bars stretch or shrink for a bigger or smaller version of this job — handy for sanity-checking before you trust the defaults.

Waiting on another trade

Not every gap in a schedule is idle time — sometimes you're just waiting on the plumber, an inspector, or a countertop fabricator before your crew can pick back up. Add one with ⏳ Waiting on another trade when creating a task on the Schedule tab.

Give it a name for what you're waiting on ("Plumber rough-in", "Final inspection"), how many days it usually takes, and which trade it's on. The bar shows up hatched and amber with a ⏳ so it reads differently from your crew's real work at a glance — drag and resize it just like any other bar, and chain dependencies to it the same way (tile can't start until the wait for inspection clears, for example).

A wait doesn't show up on your crew's task list and can't be clocked into — it's a placeholder for the calendar, not a job for your team. It still counts for the schedule's day-by-day math and still pushes downstream tasks out if it runs long.

At the top of the tab, set Start [N] days after signing. That's your lead time — how long it typically takes you to get a crew on site after a client signs. When a client signs a proposal built from this template, BidCraft pencils in a start date that many days out and dates every task from there, in the order and spacing you laid out. You'll get a chance to confirm or adjust that start date on the project itself — nothing books a crew automatically.

If you'd rather not hand-tune a schedule for a given project type, that's fine — leave the tab in its automatic state (or hit Use automatic layout to clear a custom one) and BidCraft will still lay out a sensible day-by-day plan from your lines and tasks when a project of that type gets signed. The Schedule tab just lets you take the wheel when you want the timing to match how your crew actually works.

You can also just tell Biddy what you want changed — "push the tile line back two days," "add a two-day gap before grout," "waterproofing needs to finish before tile starts" — and it'll make the edit and show you a confirmation card before it touches anything.

Editing templates by talking to Biddy

Open Biddy on any template page and it sees the template you're looking at, line by line. Tell it what to change in plain words:

• "Add a line for glass door install after the tile line"
• "Merge demo and haul-away into one line" — materials and tasks from both lines come along, deduplicated
• "Split waterproofing out of the tile install line"
• "Rename the first line to Demolition"
• "Redo the whole thing — I want 4 lines: demo, backer + waterproofing, tile, grout and cleanup"
• "Reset this to the BidCraft default" — your current version is archived to template history first

Every edit shows a confirmation card before it touches the template, and big rewrites archive your previous version (same 5-version history as saving). Template edits through Biddy are owner/admin only. The materials and tasks inside a line are still edited on the page itself — Biddy handles the line structure.

[!tip] New accounts start with no templates of their own in Your job types. You fill them by generating, installing starters, or importing a pack (see the top of this article). Once a template is in, you can edit it, delete lines that don't apply, or hit ↻ Reset to defaults in the template page header to start over from BidCraft's version of that category.

Older accounts that already had populated templates keep every one — nothing gets wiped.

What templates DON'T do

Templates aren't rules. They're starting points. The AI auto-adjusts per-project — if the synthesis shows plumbing work and your template doesn't have a Plumbing line, one gets added. If your template has a Glass Enclosure line and the synthesis shows no glass, it gets dropped. You don't have to refuse the AI's suggestion and redraft. The template is the shape you usually want; the AI handles the per-job exceptions.

Your template is the starting list; BidCraft's is only the fallback. Before you've set up a template for a project type, BidCraft drafts from its own standard list for that type. The moment you initialize or save a template, yours is the list every draft starts from — and the two are built from the same bones, so they never disagree about what counts as its own line. Two things worth knowing about those bones: a shower niche is its own line by default (many contractors price it separately — delete the line from your template if you'd rather fold it into the wall tile), and edge trim is folded into the tile line everywhere (it rides along as part of the install; add a trim line to your template if you quote it separately). Whatever your template says, the drafter honours: a niche line in your template stays a line, and a trim line in your template stays a line.

This matters because contractors sometimes treat a saved template like a contract with the AI — "I told you not to add lines!" — and end up fighting the system instead of letting it do its job. Save the shape, then trust the AI to flex it where the project demands.

Bundling sub-scopes into a single line

You'll sometimes write a line that intentionally covers multiple kinds of work — like a single Tile Install line that already includes waterproofing, substrate prep, and grout. Without a signal, the AI might look at your project and add a separate "Waterproofing" line on top, charging twice for work you've already accounted for.

Each template line has a Bundles picker for exactly this. Tap + Bundle a sub-scope and pick the kinds of work this one line already covers (waterproofing, substrate prep, demo, grout, etc.). Once tagged, the AI knows: "Don't break these out into their own lines. Don't add extra cost on the side. The contractor folded them in."

Tags carry from the template into every proposal generated from it. You can free-type tags too — just type one and hit Enter. Use this whenever you've combined work into a single line that the AI might otherwise want to split.

Creating variants — Small, Medium, Large Bathroom Remodel

When the same project type comes in different shapes — small / medium / large bathroom remodels, full demo vs. refresh-only, standard vs. premium finish — you don't need to bend one template to cover all of them. Create a variant: a sibling template that shares the parent's project type but gets its own lines.

On the parent template page, hit + Create variant in the top toolbar. The modal asks for an optional size, scope, and finish-level tag, plus a free-form qualifier — pick whatever combinations matter to your business. The variant is saved with a name like "Full Bathroom Remodel — Small" (or whatever you type), with the parent's lines deep-copied as a starting point. Edit the variant freely without touching the parent.

When you (or anyone on your team) creates a new project, the picker shows variants in a Your custom types group right alongside the standard project types — type "bathroom remodel" and you'll see Small, Medium, and Large all in one list. Pick the one that fits and the scope draft anchors on that variant's lines.

Variants and the parent stay independent: editing one doesn't propagate to the other, and archiving a parent leaves its variants in place. Use the parent's Variants section near the bottom of its page to jump into any variant's editor.

[!tip] Variants are a one-time setup for projects you do over and over. If you do five "Small Bathroom Remodel" jobs per year, a Small variant means you skip re-tuning the template five times.

Job type templates vs Build Recipes

Two different layers, both quietly working for you:

• Job type templates capture the project-level shape — how many lines a Shower Remodel has, what order they go in, what the scope sounds like.
• Build Recipes capture the material doctrine under each service — the waterproofing you always use, the thinset for large-format tile, the steps your crew walks through.

Most contractors edit one or the other without thinking about the relationship. That's fine. They complement each other, and you don't have to manage them together.

The template grid

The Lines tab lays your template out as a grid, one row per line:

• Line: the name, what the homeowner reads, and (in small grey text) what's folded into it, like Setting · Grout · Caulk · Trim.
• How it's priced: one of six ways (below).
• Price: the number your bids use, like $22.00 / sq ft, $35 each, $350, or $1,350 for 1.5 days at your day rate.
• Cost: what the line costs you (materials, plus labor on a by-the-day line at what a crew day costs you).
• Margin: green at 35% and up, gold from 20% to 34%, red under 20%.
• Mat and Tasks: how many materials and tasks the line carries. A grey icon means none yet.

Click the price to change it right in the row: type the number and press Enter. On a by-the-day line, that number is the crew days.

Drag the dotted handle at the left of a row to reorder lines (press and hold on a phone). The ⋮ menu at the end of a row opens the line, moves it up or down, makes it optional or required, or removes it. An Optional tag means the line is only added when the job calls for it; tap the tag to make it required again.

On a phone, each line is a card with its name, what the homeowner reads, how it's priced, the price, and its materials and tasks counts. Tap a card to open it.

The line editor

Click any line (anywhere except the handle, the ⋮ menu or the price) and the line editor opens on the right, or full screen on a phone. The line's name and What the homeowner reads sit at the top. Below are three tabs:

Pricing. Pick how the line is priced, then type the one number it needs:

• Per sq ft or Per lin ft: a rate, times what you measure on the job. On a tile-setting line, a note shows how your tile difficulty adds to it (mosaic +50%, 24×48 +55% and so on), with a link to change those.
• Each: a price per item, times the count on the job (2 niches is twice the price).
• Flat for job: one price for the whole line.
• By the day: crew days, times your day rate. The editor shows the math, like 1.5 days × your $900 day rate = $1,350.
• At cost: billed at what the materials cost you, with no markup. No price to type.

Switching how a line is priced clears the number, so a $16 per-sq-ft rate never turns into a $16 flat price by accident. The tab also shows the line's cost and margin, and what's folded into the line.

Materials and Tasks. The same lists you'd see on a service, for this line.

Nothing saves until you hit Save line. Cancel asks before throwing away changes. The footer says it plainly: changes affect new bids, and bids you've already sent stay as sent.

A price used on more than one template

If the line's service is also on another template, the Pricing tab says so: Also on: Shower remodel, Tub to shower. Changing the price changes it there too. When you save a new price or a new way of pricing, BidCraft asks first. Name and wording changes don't ask.

The same editor on your services list

On Catalog → Services, clicking a service row opens this same editor, with every template that uses the service listed under Also on. The service name and the Details menu item still open the full service page.

Next steps

• See how the material layer under each service works: How Build Recipes work
• Wire up the services that drive proposal pricing: Building your service catalog
• Teach Biddy your preferred products by tagging favorites: Service materials and favorite-for-roles