If you've ever locked a scope at one number and had the proposal come back at another, this is the fix.
What was going wrong
Two things, and both of them only ever moved money in one direction — up.
A whole-line price billed as a rate. Some lines get their size worked out for you — a shower pan, a surface-prep run. When nobody had measured one of those yet, BidCraft would fall back to a standard allowance for its size, which is the right call. But if that line's price had come from crew days or a flat service price — a single number for the whole line, not a rate per square foot — the build multiplied that whole number by the allowance. A pan you read at $1,350 on the scope table could arrive on the proposal at $16,200.
A quantity you typed, overwritten. If you typed a billed quantity on one of those same lines — 30 square feet of a 48 square foot floor, because that's what you're actually charging for — the scope table priced it your way and the build quietly went back to 48. Your rate survived; your quantity didn't.
Both are fixed. A price you read on the scope table is now the price that ships, to the cent, and a quantity you typed beats anything the app worked out for itself.
When a price does legitimately change
Two things can still move a line between locking and the finished proposal, and both are the right answer — they just used to arrive without saying anything.
Now they wear a small amber chip on the line in Costs & materials:
- priced at build — this line had no price on the scope table, because nothing in your catalog matched it and there was no rule to fall back on. Those are the lines that showed ≈ prices at build before you locked. BidCraft priced it using your day rate when it built the proposal.
- scope $408 → $576 — the line was re-measured between locking and building, usually because you confirmed a plan reading or typed a wall area afterwards. Your rate didn't change; the area under it did.
Tap the line and you get the whole sentence, including which measurement moved.
Above the proposal itself there's a one-line summary — how many lines came out different and by how much — so a change is never something you have to notice by subtracting one screen from another. When nothing moved, you see neither the chips nor the summary, which is most of the time now.
And the scope total says whose number it is
One thing that made this confusing: after building a proposal, going back to the scope screen would show a total that had climbed to match it. Nothing was being rewritten — the scope screen simply re-prices lines against your catalog every time you open it, and by then the build had saved services for lines your catalog didn't have before. So lines that couldn't be priced before were suddenly priced, and the total moved.
Honest arithmetic, confusing to watch. Now that the proposal exists, the Scope & pricing chip at the top says proposal total next to the figure, so you can see which document you're reading.