Best Electrical Estimating Guides

4 Contract Tips for Electrical Contractors   If you are a small business owner, you might wonder whether contracts are necessary when conducting your business. Regardless of the size or nature of your company, written agreements serve some essential purposes.   Understanding why you might need a contract, what goes into a successful deal, and how to negotiate the terms can protect your business and offer you a legal footing if a conflict arises. Use these helpful tips to help develop successful contracts for your small business.   The Best Bid Hybrid Pro includes built in proposals and contracts to keep you paid. Best Bid Electrical Estimating Software is easy to use, accurate, and affordable. Call 800-941-7028 to learn how we can help with all your electrical estimating needs!  ...

With all the growing threats to our environment, there’s never been a more pressing need for “green” businesses than now. Building an eco-minded enterprise isn’t just good for the planet, it can also prove highly profitable. Here are a few tips from Best Bid Estimating Software for getting yours off the ground. Online Tools You’ll also find plenty of online tools and programs to help youlaunch your operation and save on costs. You can start by moving away frompaper and digitizing your paper records. With the BestBid Hybrid Pro, you can save countless trees and eliminatepaper waste by uploading PDFs of your electrical drawings directly into thesoftware. This feature allows you to perform takeoffs directly from yourcomputer screen, saving time and paper while giving you complete control overthe process. The takeoff module...

Learn what you don't know about Best Bid Electrical Estimating Software.

It is obviously not obvious. I teach a lot of people how to estimate electrical projects. I also teach or at least share my experience of running an electrical contracting business with many new people with little more than a dream. You would think if you are starting an electrical contracting business that a few things would be obvious like: Having a name for your company. Having the correct license. Having employees. Having a way to get your employees to the job. Having enough tools to get started. Cords, ladders, drills, benders, etc. Having enough working capital to pay your employees. Setting up an account with an Electrical Supply House. Having a few customers willing to give you work or at least bid their work. Some idea of how to...

Labor Burden    What does it actually cost my Electrical Company to work an employee?   This is a great question! If you are going to run a profitable electrical contracting business, then you need to know exactly what running that business costs. That knowledge will allow you to estimate electrical projects accurately and also keep you in business.   What you pay your employee is not what it cost you to work that employee.   Often employees don’t appreciate or consider what compensation they are being paid that does not show up on their paycheck. Most only look at what they bring home each week. If you are providing a phone, truck, 401K, vacation, holidays, and insurance, for example, they are receiving more compensation than what shows on their...

10-Reasons to use the Best Bid Hybrid Pro 01. Speed Using the Best Bid Hybrid Pro will make estimating faster than you could ever imagine. Being able to select an Assembly, enter your quantities, and generate the perfect material list of products that would take hours to produce by hand is amazing. Not only are the materials listed, they are priced, extended, and the time it should take to install is also recorded. Collecting detailed information about the estimate with just a few clicks makes estimating seem effortless. 02.  Accuracy Spending time massaging your results before doing your first estimate will ensure that the results that you receive are spot on. No more math mistakes or wrong extensions. No more extending a long list of prices or man-hours. Your estimates...

You woke up today with an increasable desire to change the way your company is estimating electrical projects. Furthermore, you know that you have fallen behind on technology. You finally understand that you must have electrical estimating software to compete.  What you have not discovered so far is how many estimating products there are on the market. You have also not discovered that it is not that easy to sort through the choices. Basically, they all say the same thing. We can save you time, we are easy to use and of course, we can win you more work at a greater profit.  Subsequently, when you started looking for electrical estimating software you might have thought that you would just GOOGLE electrical estimating software and the first name that shows...

You won the project but that is just the start. One of the most overlooked tasks in electrical contracting is Job Tracking. Smaller electrical contractors, just getting their electrical shop open, are overwhelmed with all the things that they have never had experienced being an electrician in the field. The list can be sobering, to say the least. License, insurance, Taxes, Payroll, OSHA rules, Employee rights, purchasing tools, and trucks. We could list an entire page of items and not touch the surface. Being confident with your estimates. Being confident in estimating electrical projects is one thing but tracking the estimate after the bid is equally important.  Furthermore, new electrical contractors, without a lot of previous office experience often fall victim to making decisions that are not knowledge-based. Bidding electrical work by the sq. ft or unit pricing will close your business fast. Not...

I only missed (2) light fixtures no big deal, right? The overlooked estimator As estimators, we will never be perfect and from time to time we will miss something. We do our best to get it right and weigh our time spent VS cranking out enough estimates to please the boss. Not everyone understands the importance of the estimate. After all, if the estimate isn't right, nothing else matters. The estimate is the foundation of the entire project. Your company will fail or succeed in its ability to estimate. Estimators seldom get the credit they deserve. Moreover, it is the Project Manager and Superintendent over the project that has the day-to-day control of the outcome, after the estimate. Subsequently, their face will be the face that is remembered as the...

The lost art of estimating In today’s computer age we have become custom to just pushing buttons and living with the results. The art of actually entering our knowledge along with the computer generated results has long been forgotten. Shorter bid dates, having to produce more estimates than ever before, are some of the issues we face each day. Detailed electrical estimating seems to be a lost art.