You know what the work goes for. The question is what your number has to be.
Two screens in this product already answer the questions that come before a bid. What this class of work goes for, from the award record. What the people inside it cost an hour, from the published schedule rates. Neither of them answers the one that decides whether to bid: at my rates, staffed the way I would staff it, what do I have to charge, and does that land anywhere near where this buyer has ever paid?
1,840 awarded rates from 212 companies
Hours and salaries in, a defensible price out
Labor categories, people, hours by period and hourly rates. Then your indirect rates: fringe, overhead, G and A and fee. Type the rates you already have, or pick one of your saved rate sets, which the Indirect rates screen in the books works out from your own people, pay and costs. Each one applies to the total above it, which is why the order is not a style choice and why two spreadsheets built from the same inputs can disagree by fifteen percent.
Out of it comes the price, every intermediate figure behind it, and the wrap rate. The wrap rate is the single number a pricer quotes, because it turns any salary into a billable rate in one multiplication, and it is what gets compared across everybody bidding the same work.
- Fringe, overhead, material handling, G and A and fee, applied in the order they actually apply
- A G and A base you choose: total cost input, or value added with materials and subcontracts left out
- Your wrap rate, your price per month and your average billed hour
- A labor rate table: the direct rate and the fully burdened rate for every labor category, in every period
- Hours by period, typed for each role
- Every subcontract, purchase and trip as a cost line of its own, with the quote it came from
- Each line priced by its contract type: a fixed price, hours at a rate with materials at cost, or cost and fee stated apart
- Scenarios side by side, so two ways of staffing the work can be compared before one is sent
- Saved rate sets from your own books, or rates you type
- Every step shown, because a total nobody can take apart is a total nobody will defend
each pool sits on the total under it, which is why the order is not a style choice
A base period and its options, with escalation that compounds
Almost no federal contract is one year. It is a base period and some number of option periods, and the option prices are agreed at award: the government may exercise year five at the number you wrote down four years earlier, and it is not obliged to renegotiate because your labour got dearer.
So the worksheet prices the term, not the year. Each period carries its own length, its own escalation on labour, its own escalation on everything else, and a level of effort where an option year is a different size from the base. Escalation compounds, which is the part that is usually got wrong by hand: three per cent a year is 1.03 then 1.0609, not 1.03 then 1.06, and the difference always runs in the direction that loses money.
Each period can also carry its own indirect rates, because provisional rates move year to year and a pricer who knows their overhead is coming down in the out years should be able to say so. Leave a box empty and that period inherits the sheet.
- Up to ten periods: a base and nine options
- Labour and other costs escalate on separate rates, because those two markets do not move together
- Level of effort per period, for the option year that is half the scope
- Per-period rate overrides, and per-period figures for the year with the one-time buy in it
- One button to put the same escalation on every option, because that is the common case
money not obligated by 30 September goes back, and nobody gets credit for handing it back
A price per line item, and lines that add to the total
Section B of a solicitation is a list of priced lines: program management as one, engineering as another, each with a number, a quantity and a unit. The cost volume has to follow it. A total price with no line items under it is a volume an evaluator cannot check against the schedule they were given, and the first thing that comes back is a question.
So the worksheet prices by line. Every role is assigned to the line it belongs to, each line carries its own type and quantity and can carry its own materials, subcontracts and travel, and each line is burdened on its own through the same chain: fringe, overhead, handling, G and A, fee. The line prices then add to the period price exactly. Not near enough, exactly, because the period total is taken as the sum of the lines rather than worked out separately and reconciled afterwards.
That works because every step of the chain is a percentage of what is below it. Burdening each line on its own and adding them up is the same arithmetic as burdening the whole sheet, so there is no allocation rule to argue about and no pool anybody has to agree how to split. The numbering follows the convention too: 0001 in the base period is 1001 in the first option and 2001 in the second, so the table reads the way the schedule does.
Leave the card empty and the sheet prices as one line, which is what it always did.
- Up to twenty line items, each with a number, a title, a contract type, a quantity and a unit
- Every role assigned to a line, and priced into it
- A price and a unit price per line, per period, and across the whole term
- Mixed types on one sheet: a fixed price line beside a time and materials line
- Lines that add to the total exactly, which is the whole reason to do it this way
What the escalation is costing you, said out loud
The screen states what the same term would have priced at with no escalation anywhere, and the difference. That is the number a pricer needs and almost never works out, because it takes a second model to produce it.
It matters in both directions. A bid with no escalation on it is not a keener price, it is a cost you have chosen to absorb in years three, four and five, and the worksheet says so in as many words rather than quietly producing a lower total. A bid with escalation on it can see exactly how much of the headline figure is work and how much is time.
The two prices are read against two different bands, like for like. The whole term is read against contract ceilings, because a ceiling is base and all options. The base period is read against what has been obligated, because that is what has been paid so far. A whole term set against obligations reads as dear when it is not. The wrap rate and the role check stay on the base period, because the published rates they are read against are current ones. Both numbers are on the screen and each says which it is.
three per cent a year is 1.03 and then 1.0609, not 1.03 and then 1.06, and the government may exercise the last year at the number you wrote down four years earlier
Where your number lands in what has actually been paid
A price is not high or low in the abstract. It is high or low against the distribution of what this buying office has paid for this class of work, and that distribution is already on file here, built from the award record rather than from a survey.
So the total is placed on the band: roughly which percentile, how far from the median, and what that position means. Above the dearest tenth of anything on record is not a close loss. It is a bid nobody read.
- Your whole term marked on the band of contract ceilings from the award record
- Your base period marked on the band of what has been obligated
- The percentile, and the distance to the median in dollars and percent
- The office band where there is enough history, the national one where there is not
- Where none of the awards carries a ceiling, the term is not placed, and the screen says so
the shape of the distribution, not a point on it
Every role checked against what that role is published at
This is the one almost nothing else does. A price can land dead on the median and still lose, because one role inside it bills at twice what anybody charges for that title, and that is how an evaluator decides a staffing plan is not credible.
Your direct rate multiplied by your wrap rate is the rate the government would see. The published rate band says what that role goes for across every company holding it. Those two get compared line by line, not in total.
- Every role marked in band, dear, cheap, over market or under market
- The published median and middle half for the role, and how many rates stand behind it
- A role nobody publishes a rate for gets no verdict rather than a guessed one
- What it would take to land on the median, three different ways
UEI, CAGE, then normalized name
Your indirect rates, worked out rather than guessed
The indirect rate calculator is on the Indirect rates screen, in the books. It works the three rates out from your own timesheets, pay runs and cost ledger and keeps them as rate sets. The worksheet offers those sets, and one fills the percentages and both bases. The fee is yours to set. With no rate set on the account yet, you type the rates. The reading beside your price is arithmetic on the figures on the screen rather than a generated paragraph. Nothing it produces is a rate submission to the government, and it is not accounting advice.
Started from a pursuit, and out as a file
A worksheet opened from a pursuit on your pipeline knows which pursuit it prices, and the pursuit shows its price. Any sheet downloads as an Excel workbook or a CSV file and prints. It is not submitted to anybody: you place the bid.
Your numbers stay on your sheet
A worksheet holds figures about your own company rather than ones the government published. It is stored against your account and only people on your account can read it. It is never mixed into a price band, a rate band, or any other figure published here, because every one of those is built from the federal record and one member's cost base inside one of them would quietly make that untrue for everybody. Nothing is stored at all until you press Save.
Travel, worked out from GSA's per diem rates
Press Add travel on a worksheet, pick the place, and give each period its trip: the first day or the month, the nights, the travellers and how many trips. Lodging is priced at each night's rate for its month, and meals at the day rate, with the first and the last day at three quarters. The lines come back as ordinary cost lines in the period they belong to, and the sheet prices and saves them as it does every other line.
Airfare, a car and mileage are yours to type. A trip later than the last year GSA has published is priced at that year, and its line says so. Per diem rates has the lookup and the detail.
Where it is in the app
Price volume, under Proposal in the menu. Proposal is the part of LastAwarded that builds the response, one of the eight parts.
Related
- What it goes forThe band your price is read against.
- Labor ratesThe published rate every role is checked against.
- The booksWhere your rate sets are worked out.
- Capture plans NewWhether the pursuit is worth your month in the first place.
- Module 11: Pricing and costHow a federal price is built, from the beginning.
See who was last awarded in your NAICS
Every code, every buying office, every vendor and every recompete, organized from the federal record and read nightly. Open it with a plan.