Day rate, multipliers, and overhead

When BidCraft prices a proposal, it isn't pulling numbers from the sky — it's running your project's labor and materials through your pricing engine. The engine has a handful of dials. Set them right once and every future proposal lands in your wheelhouse. Here's what each dial does.

Day rate

Your day rate is your all-in price for one crew-day — the full number you'd build into a client quote, with your overhead, profit, and waste already baked in. It is not your raw crew cost "before markup." BidCraft prices crew-day labor at exactly this number and does not add an overhead or profit markup on top — because you've already included it here.

For most tile crews this all-in number lands somewhere between $900 and $1,800 per crew-day. A two-person crew in a high cost-of-living area will be higher; a solo installer in a rural market will be lower.

This number drives every line item that's priced by crew-days (which is most install and demo work). If your day rate is wrong, every proposal will be wrong by the same percentage.

[!important] Set this to what you charge, not what your crew costs. If you enter your raw cost, your proposals will be priced at cost with no profit, because nothing gets added on top. The pricing interview will nudge you toward your all-in number if you give it a cost figure by mistake.

[!tip] Not sure what your all-in crew-day rate should be? Start from your fully-loaded crew cost (wages, taxes, truck, tools, insurance), then add the overhead and profit you want per day. That total is your day rate. The guided walkthrough can walk you through it.

Crew cost per day

Your day rate is what you charge. This one is what a crew day costs you — wages, payroll taxes, the truck, the fuel. Two different numbers, and BidCraft keeps them apart on purpose: the price of a job reads your day rate, and every cost page (a project's Costs & materials step, its Cost Analysis, the margin figures) reads your crew cost per day.

Leave it blank and BidCraft estimates it: your day rate with your overhead and profit percentages backed out. At $900 a day with 15% overhead and 20% profit that's about $667. Wherever the estimate shows, it says estimated, so you can tell a number you typed from one BidCraft guessed. Type the real figure and the estimate goes away everywhere at once.

[!tip] If your margins on labor-only lines look suspiciously perfect, or suspiciously thin, this is usually why. Fill it in with what a day of your crew actually runs and the margins on every job get honest.

Complexity multipliers

Not all tile work takes the same amount of time per square foot. Multipliers capture the "how much harder is this?" reality of different jobs — and BidCraft now applies them for you, surface by surface, on every proposal.

How they actually get applied

Each wall, floor, pan, and niche on a project carries the finishes you recorded — material, tile size, pattern — whether those came from a voice note, a photo, or you picking them by hand in the surface editor. When a proposal builds, BidCraft reads those finishes off each surface a line covers and looks them up in your multiplier tables by name.

Sizes are read however you happen to write them. 12x24, 12 × 24, 12" x 24", and 12 by 24 inches all land on the same row — so a size you said out loud in a voice note gets the same multiplier as one you typed with an x.

Surfaces get blended by area, so one fancy wall doesn't drag the whole line up:

A shower with a 40 sqft herringbone marble back wall (your rows add up to ×2.3) and 72 sqft of plain 12x24 walls (×1.05) prices the walls line at about ×1.5 — the honest weighted average of what's on those walls, not the high number and not the low one.

On a job with several rooms, each room prices with its own finishes. A line for the Primary Bath floor reads the Primary Bath floor, not every floor in the house, so a herringbone marble bath and a straight-lay porcelain laundry each get their own multiplier instead of one blended number shared by both. A line that genuinely does the same work in several rooms (say, "floor tile, all bathrooms") still blends the rooms it covers, by area. When you pick the surfaces a line covers on the Bid page, each room's surfaces are listed under that room, and ticking one covers that room only.

Within one surface, the three tables stack additively: a herringbone marble mosaic isn't ×1.5 × ×1.3 × ×1.5, it's ×1.0 plus each row's step above baseline. Rows sitting at 1.00x add nothing, which is the point — they're your normal.

Multipliers move crew days too, at full strength. Day estimates start from standard straight-lay field tile, then the same multiplier stretches them. A 2-day base install on a herringbone wall becomes 3 days — so your labor pricing and your schedule both reflect the pattern, not just the client's price.

Add a row for anything not listed

The row name is the matching interface. There's nothing to tag, tick, or link — if you price something the tables don't list, add a row and name it the way you'd say it out loud ("Natural Stone", "1/3 Offset", "Mosaic/4x4"), and BidCraft will match the finishes on your projects to it.

If a finish on a job can't find a row, the proposal says so by name, so you can add or rename a row in the Tile difficulty panel and regenerate instead of quietly getting billed at a flat rate. Plain-tile jobs with nothing unusual on them stay silent.

The three tables

Tile size. Bigger tiles take longer to install per square foot — heavier, less forgiving, more cutting waste. Smaller mosaics also take longer per square foot than mid-size tile because of all the grouting and sheet alignment. The mid-size tiles (12x24, 12x12) usually sit at 1.00x; everything else flexes up.

Tile material. Marble, travertine, and other natural stone take longer than ceramic or porcelain — more careful handling, slower cuts, sealing steps. The material multiplier captures that.

Pattern. A straight stack-bond is the baseline. Herringbone, chevron, basketweave, and other patterns add cutting waste and layout time. Each pattern has its own multiplier you can dial in.

All three live in the Tile difficulty panel, behind its Size / Material / Pattern switch. Each row has a small drawn tile next to its name so you can see what it means at a glance. Click a name to rename it, click a number to change it, and add or delete rows as you go. The guided walkthrough points the tile out; you can tune the tables then or come back anytime.

They raise labor on tile-setting lines only. A job only uses them when it records the tile size, material or pattern. A job with none of those recorded prices at your normal rate.

[!tip] Want to see the math on a real job? Open a proposal's Costs & Materials view and expand a tile line — the Tile complexity block shows your base rate, the blended multiplier, and which finish on which wall drove it.

Margin goal: overhead and profit

The Margin goal tile holds two numbers and shows them as one goal.

• Overhead is your business overhead as a percent: office rent, software, insurance, marketing, the part of your truck payments that isn't a job-day cost. For most one-to-three-crew shops this lands between 10% and 25%.
• Profit is the clean profit you want per job. This is the number that decides whether a year of work leaves you ahead or just busy. 15–30% is typical.

Both are a percent on top of your costs. The tile turns them into one goal, as a share of the price: overhead 15% and profit 20% on top of your costs keeps 26% of the price, not 35%. On each bid, that's the part of the price you aim to keep for running the business and for profit.

[!important] The margin goal is not added to your prices. Your day rate and catalog rates are already all-in, so this is a goal BidCraft checks your bids against. In Cost Analysis it backs out your implied cost and shows whether each line carries the margin you intended. If a line comes in below the goal, the margin reads in warm coral so you can catch it before sending.

There's no separate "regional" knob to set. Your day rate is already your market's number, so nothing extra is applied on top. If your area runs higher or lower, set your day rate to match and every proposal follows.

Project minimum

The Minimum tile is the smallest job you'll take, in dollars. No bid goes under it. Leave it blank for no minimum.

Per-role crew rates (optional)

Most contractors price labor at one all-in day rate. If your crews mix roles at different rates — a lead tile setter, a journeyman, a helper — you can switch the Day rate panel to Rate per crew role and give each role its own day rate. Then, on any project, the Crew tab (next to Schedule and Tasks) shows the crew that project needs and blends those rates into one effective day rate for the bid: one lead + one journeyman + one helper at $850 / $650 / $400 prices that project's crew-day labor at $1,900/day.

The crew rolls up automatically from the tasks on the project (the most people any single task needs, per role), and you can dial it by hand on the Crew tab. Every project also has a one-tap Flat / Per-role toggle, so an unfilled crew never throws off a bid — leave it on flat and you get your single day rate exactly like before. If you told BidCraft who's usually on the job when you set up your pricing (just you, you and a helper, or a crew), a per-role project that has no crew yet prices at that usual crew instead of falling back to the flat rate.

Each role also has a cost box beside its rate (the second number in the row): what that role costs you per day. It blends the same way the rates do, so a project's labor cost comes out of the same crew its price did. Leave any role's cost blank and it's estimated from its rate; the cost pages say partly estimated until every role in the crew has one.

Marking up materials

By default, materials are passed through to the client at your cost — the margin on a job lives in your all-in day rate, not in the materials. For a lot of tile contractors that's exactly right, especially when the client supplies the tile and you're only billing thinset, grout, and waterproofing.

But some contractors do want to make margin on the materials they supply. The Mark up materials toggle on the Materials tile lets you do that:

• Off (default) — materials are billed at cost. Your day rate carries the margin.
• On — set a percentage, and BidCraft adds that margin to the materials portion of crew-day line prices. A 20% materials markup turns $500 of materials into $600 on the client's price.

This only affects lines priced by crew-days. Lines priced per square foot or per linear foot already have materials baked into your rate, and pass-through items (permits, dump fees) are always at cost — the toggle leaves both of those alone.

Who supplies the tile?

The Tile tile asks Who buys the tile? It's a common split in tile work:

• You supply it — you buy and price the tile, so it shows up in your client-facing materials cost.
• The client buys it — the client picks and pays for the tile themselves. BidCraft leaves the tile out of your client-facing materials so you're not quoting a cost the client is already covering (your setting materials — thinset, grout, waterproofing — still count).

This is your default, and it's what BidCraft assumes when it prices a job.

Overriding it on one job

Plenty of shops do it both ways depending on the customer — a builder hands you the tile, a homeowner asks you to source it. So it's a per-project question, and you can answer it in two places:

• On Bid, right under the draft total — Who supplies the tile?
• On Costs & Materials, in the section header — Tile supplied by

It's the same setting either way, with the same three answers:

• Org default — follow the setting above (the picker tells you which way that is).
• Contractor supplies — you're buying the tile on this job.
• Client supplies (allowance) — they're buying it.

When the client supplies it, the tile still shows on the materials list — you're the one installing it, and nobody should forget to check it in — but it prices at $0 to you and carries a "Tile allowance" note so it doesn't read as money you're spending.

Change it and rebuild the proposal so the pricing reflects it. Only owners and admins see the picker.

Waste goes on the tile whoever buys it

Your waste % pads the materials that get cut, broken or mixed — tile, thinset, grout, and leveling clips — before BidCraft works out how many boxes and bags to order, so the quantity on the list is what actually goes in the van, not the bare square footage. Membranes, backer board, trim, and drains are bought to the exact count and never padded.

It applies whoever supplies the tile. When the client buys it, the tile row still costs you $0, but its quantity includes the waste and says so — "Includes 10% waste — buy 66 sq ft" — because the homeowner is the one who has to order enough.

The waste % on the Materials tile is your default. Each tiled surface on a project can carry its own (a herringbone floor usually needs more than a straight-lay wall), and a surface you haven't set uses this default — whatever it is, including the standard 10% if you never changed it. (Only an account with no waste % saved at all falls back to the standard for that tile and lay.)

The one exception is a surface measured from a builder's takeoff that printed its own waste: it keeps the takeoff's figure, or 0% if you used the takeoff numbers as printed, ahead of this default.

See Materials lists explained for the table. Waste never changes the measured area, the square footage you charge for, or the labor.

Where waste changed a quantity, the material row says so — "Includes 10% waste" — so you can always tell an allowance from a formula that needs a look.

Marking one material client-supplied

Sometimes it's just one item — they picked out the accent mosaic themselves, everything else is yours. Open the materials list on Costs & Materials, tap the row, and tick Client supplies this one. The row stays on the list so nobody forgets to install it, its cost drops to $0 on your side, and the old cost is parked in the row's notes in case you flip it back.

Where to edit them

Everything lives on one page: Settings → Pricing templates. Older links to the Pricing Strategy page still work and open it.

The top of the page is How you charge, one wall of eight tiles: Day rate, Materials, Tile and Tile difficulty on the first row, Minimum, Margin goal, Pricing rules and Biddy's alerts on the second (two across on a phone). Each tile shows what you have saved. Tap a tile to open its panel (a side panel on a computer, full screen on a phone). Each panel has its own Save and Cancel, and if you close it with unsaved changes it asks before throwing them away. A save changes new bids; bids you've already sent stay as sent.

Below the tiles is Your job types, your project templates. See How job type templates work.

You can also just tell Biddy — "set my day rate to $1,150" — and it'll update for you with a confirmation.

The guided walkthrough is the fastest way to set everything for the first time. Biddy opens the Day rate panel, then the Margin goal panel, points you at the Tile and Materials tiles for who buys the tile and your waste, then explains pricing rules. Start it from Set my pricing in Biddy's welcome tour or the purple Pricing tuned ring at the top right of Pricing templates.

Next steps

Once your numbers are dialed, the next layer is pricing rules — free-form guidelines that override or add to the math. See Pricing rules and the pricing meter.

If you have past proposals you've already sent to clients, you can short-circuit a lot of this setup by uploading them. The AI extracts your real-world prices and seeds your pricing memory. See Uploading sample proposals to teach BidCraft your prices.