About bid items

Important! Bid items, in contrast to job phases, only affect estimates and some billing items and do not follow through the entire job.

Bid items provide a way to divide estimates into smaller parts. You use bid items to segment estimates into smaller units and/or to satisfy external requirements for bidding and billing a job. Bid items affect these line items: Daily Field Reports, Proposal, and Unitary Billing.

Bid items can be entered in either 9-5 Takeoffs or in 3-5 Jobs (Accounts Receivable). There are four bid item types: 1-Base Bid, 2-Allowance, 3-Alternate, and 4-Change Order. Bid items may follow the general schema of the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI), such as 1-General Conditions, 2-Site Work, 3-Concrete, and so on, or they may be specific to your business needs.

Bid items can provide a solution when a client or lender requires you to submit a proposal based on bid items. Some contractors even use bid items internally as another way to track project data. The bid item categories can differ from job to job and are not necessarily determined by types of work performed. After the list of bid items is set up for a job, you can use the bid items when creating an estimate budget and proposal. In addition, you can create unitary bills by bid item. You can also use the Item Code column to reference alphanumeric codes, which are required by many projects.

You can provide overhead and profit rates for each bid item. When you calculate a takeoff the first time, Sage 100 Contractor applies the appropriate overhead and profit rates to the extended costs of the assemblies and parts listed under each bid item. You can update or change the overhead and profit rates from the Bid Items window at any time.