Generating your first proposal

Once you lock the scope, BidCraft runs Phase 2: full pricing, full materials list, full payment schedule. This is the part that takes a beat — usually 15 to 45 seconds — because the AI is applying your pricing strategy line by line, picking SKUs from your catalog, and building a document you can put in front of a client. Here's what's happening under the hood and what you'll see when it lands.

First time? One quick day-rate question

The very first time you hit Lock & build proposal without a day rate on file, BidCraft asks one quick question before it prices anything: your all-in day rate for a typical crew. That's the single number every proposal is built on, so we make sure it's there first. Ballpark is fine — you can fine-tune it later on your Pricing page. There's nothing else to answer; your day rate already reflects your market. Answer once and you won't see it again.

If you haven't tuned your complexity multipliers yet, the finished proposal carries a gentle heads-up — "priced with BidCraft's default multipliers" — with a link to dial them in. The defaults work; your own numbers price tighter.

What gets applied

The proposal is priced using everything you taught BidCraft during the pricing interview:

• Your day rate — the base for any crew-day work
• Your multipliers — tile size, material type, and pattern complexity
• Your overhead and profit percentages
• Your pricing rules — the free-form rules you wrote in plain English ("never bid demo under $1,200")
• Your services catalog — when a line matched a green badge in scope review, the price anchors to that service

If you skipped the Advanced pass of the pricing interview, BidCraft falls back to sensible defaults for things like waste factors and time benchmarks. That'll work, but the more you've tuned, the more the proposal reads like you wrote it.

The proposal prompt also sees the AI's room-level reads — condition scores, existing material flags (mortar-bedded tile, suspected asbestos, etc.) — so when it sizes the demo line or recommends an abatement allowance, it's working from your specific job's conditions instead of a generic average. That's why a careful review on the AI findings page actually changes proposal pricing, not just what's displayed.

The finish you picked on each surface in Measurements & Scope — material, tile size, pattern — carries straight through to pricing too. A "polished vs. honed" or "large-format vs. mosaic" call you made on one wall doesn't get lost by the time the proposal builds; it's part of what sizes that line's price.

The math is shown, line by line

Every tile line on the finished proposal can show its own work. Open the Costs & Materials view, click a line, and a Tile complexity block spells it out: your base rate, the blended multiplier your Tile difficulty tables produced from the finishes on that line's surfaces, and the resulting rate — $54.00 base × 1.395 = $75.33/sqft — with chips naming which finish on which wall drove it. Underneath, the plain price chain: 103 sqft × $75.33/sqft = $7,758.99. Crew days get the same treatment when the finishes stretched them.

If a finish recorded on the job can't find a matching row in your multiplier tables, the proposal tells you by name rather than quietly pricing it flat — the fix is to add or rename a row in the Tile difficulty panel on Pricing templates and regenerate. Jobs with nothing unusual on them don't get warned about anything. See Day rate, multipliers, and overhead for how the tables work.

How BidCraft picks pricing per line

Not every line item should be priced the same way. BidCraft picks one of four pricing modes per line:

[!tip] If a line came from a matched service in your catalog, BidCraft honors that service's pricing mode. If not, it follows a smart decision tree: catalog match → pricing rule → crew-day baseline → pass-through. If anything looks off (a per-sqft total below cost, an unusually high crew-day count, etc.), an amber N notes before you send chip shows in the Notes row under the proposal bar. Tap it to read them. Only you see these notes; your client never does.

What you get back

Locking the scope lights up the two stages after it — Proposal and Costs & materials — and drafts the job's tasks over on Schedule. When the build finishes you land on the Proposal stage with all of the following ready to review:

• Scope of work — full paragraph text describing the job in client-facing language
• Line items table — every line with quantity, unit, unit price, and line total
• Subtotal, tax, and grand total — math already done
• Payment schedule — the milestones saved for the job's proposal style (set on the Payment schedule card in Proposal Settings)
• Materials list — under Costs, showing every SKU BidCraft sourced, with list price and your cost

The materials list is sourced in priority order: your services catalog first (so if a service has its preferred materials, those come along for the ride), then your personal materials library (your favorite thinset, your preferred grout), then the master catalog of every Schluter and Laticrete product BidCraft knows about.

[!warning] The first time you generate a proposal, look it over carefully. If a line price feels too high or too low, that's a signal your pricing strategy needs tuning — not a problem with the proposal itself. Tell Biddy in plain words ("the demo line should never come in under $1,500") and it'll remember for next time.

What's missing? Nothing — it's all auto-saved

The proposal auto-saves as soon as it generates. You can close the tab, walk away, come back tomorrow, and pick up where you left off. There's no "Save" button anywhere on the page — every edit you make from here on out also saves on its own.

Next steps

Now's the time to refine. Head to Editing line items to tweak individual lines, or Editing scope text and payment schedule for the surrounding language. If something feels structurally off, Regenerating the proposal walks through how to ask BidCraft for another pass.

Your execution tasks — generated from the lines in this proposal — live under the Schedule chip. See Tasks on signed projects.