Bid Drafter
Answer
Bid Drafter generates line item commercial cleaning bids with win probability scores, risk flags, and reasoning from facility specs, square footage, frequency, and labor market data.
- Win probability scores below 40 flag underbids that clients often disqualify, not overbids.
- Restroom count affects pricing more than total square footage for the same facility size.
- Healthcare facility type adds a 15 to 25% multiplier versus standard office cleaning rates.
11% average quarterly scope creep on bonded access sites
What it does
Bid Drafter takes job specifications — facility type, square footage, cleaning frequency, special scope items, and your labor market — and returns a structured commercial cleaning bid complete with line-item pricing, a win-probability score, risk flags, and reasoning. The output is ready to adapt into a client-facing proposal or to feed into your estimating worksheet.
When to use it
- Pricing a new commercial account from an RFP or site-walk notes.
- Stress-testing your existing numbers against market benchmarks before submitting.
- Building a quick ballpark before investing time in a full proposal.
- Training newer estimators — the reasoning section explains each pricing decision.
- Comparing pricing across two or more frequency scenarios (e.g., 3×/week vs daily).
Step-by-step
- Select the facility type from the dropdown. Office, healthcare, education, warehouse, retail, and government each carry different cleaning time multipliers.
- Enter square footage (cleanable area — exclude walls, non-cleanable mechanical rooms).
- Set cleaning frequency (daily, 3×/week, weekly, etc.).
- Add any scope notes — restroom count, high-touch frequency, floor type, bonded-site requirements.
- Select your state/metro for labor-market calibration.
- Click Draft my bid. Generation takes 10–30 seconds.
- Review the output: line items, win-probability score (0–100), risk flags, and the reasoning section.
- Copy or save to library. If signed in, it autosaves.
Tips that change outcomes
- Restroom count matters more than total square footage. A 20,000 sq ft office with 12 restrooms prices differently than one with 3. Always include restroom count in scope notes.
- Bonded-site scope creep averages 11% per quarter. If you're bidding a bonded-access site (bank, government, healthcare), use Frequency Matrix to lock the cadence before finalizing your bid — otherwise your labor cost assumptions will drift.
- Win-probability score <40 usually means you're underbidding. Counter-intuitive but true: the tool flags underbids as low-probability because clients who receive suspiciously low bids often disqualify them or push back on scope. If you score below 40, revisit your margin line, not your labor.
- Healthcare multiplier is significant. Select the healthcare facility type for any site with exam rooms, labs, or a HEPA cleaning requirement — the multiplier alone shifts your price 15–25% vs standard office.
- Frequency changes affect more than just labor. Daily vs 3×/week affects supply consumption, vehicle routing, and key-holder relationships. The bid output flags these side effects in the risk section — read them before proposing.
Inputs explained
| Input | What it means | Accepted values |
|---|---|---|
| Facility type | Drives cleaning time multiplier and chemical cost baseline | Office, Healthcare, Education, Warehouse, Retail, Government, Other |
| Square footage | Cleanable area in sq ft | 500 – 2,000,000 |
| Cleaning frequency | How often cleaning occurs per week | Daily, 5×/week, 3×/week, 2×/week, Weekly, Monthly, Custom |
| Scope notes | Free-text for restroom count, floor types, special scope, addenda | Plain text, up to 2,000 characters |
| State / metro | Used for BLS wage calibration | All 50 states + DC, metro-level when available |
| Margin target (%) | Optional. Your desired gross margin. Affects the win-probability score interpretation. | 5 – 60% |
Outputs explained
- Win-probability score (0–100): A calibrated estimate of how this bid compares to market range for similar scope. 50 = market rate. Above 65 = competitive. Below 35 = potentially underbid or overbid depending on context.
- Line-item pricing: Labor, supplies, overhead, and margin broken out. Each line includes the reasoning.
- Risk flags: Issues the tool detected — ambiguous scope, unusually low margin, high restroom density, or compliance items that affect staffing.
- Assumptions log: What the tool assumed when your inputs were incomplete. Review this — assumptions you disagree with should become scope clarification questions to the client.
Limits
Anonymous users get 3 free Bid Drafter runs per day. Signed-in free users have higher limits. See the limits page for the full comparison table.
Each run counts as one tool run against the per-tool limit of 10 per minute. Automated or rapid-fire submissions will trigger a rate-limit pause.
Troubleshooting
- The win-probability score is 0 or "Insufficient data."
- This appears when the scope notes are too sparse for the tool to calibrate against benchmarks. Add restroom count, floor type, and any site-specific requirements to scope notes and resubmit.
- The tool returned a very high price that doesn't match my market.
- Check that the facility type is correct — healthcare and government multipliers significantly increase the baseline. Also verify your state/metro selection. If your local market is genuinely below BLS benchmarks, note that in scope notes and the reasoning section will adjust.
- The output stopped streaming mid-way.
- This is usually a network timeout. Refresh the page and resubmit. Your inputs are cleared on refresh — copy them to a text file before refreshing if they were complex.
- I got a 429 error.
- You've hit the rate limit. The page shows a countdown timer. Wait for it to clear, then resubmit. See limits for more detail.