Blank page
to client-ready
proposal.

Orientation

The big picture

A bid moves through nine steps, running left to right across the top of the builder. You collect costs, set your margins, and hand the client a finished proposal — without re-keying a single number.

• Steps 2–6 collect your costs. The calculator does the takeoff math for the work types that have one.
• Step 7, Workup, is the Cost Workup 3.0 Sell Price Breakdown. Your costs roll up into ten cost centers, you set margins, and saving it makes the computed project total the bid's price.
• Step 8, Proposal, builds the client-facing letter. Your standard Terms & Conditions and "Services Provided by Others" load automatically for the work type, and you can preview the exact PDF.
• Order is yours. After the header is saved once, you can click any step tab in any order — nothing forces you strictly left to right.

When the bid is ready: Send for Approval → Approve → Submit to Client, and on a win, Convert to Job — the workup's per-cost-center numbers become the job's budget.

STEP 01 Header

Start the bid

Go to Jobs & Bids → + New Bid.

Required fields are marked with a red * — Client, Title / Description, and Division. Until they're filled, the Create Bid & Continue button stays greyed out and a note beside it tells you exactly what's missing (for example, "Add a client and a title to continue.").

Division

Civil or Pipeline / CP. This is the revenue division the job will report under.

Work Type — the most important field on the page

It sets everything downstream:

• which calculator appears on the Takeoff step,
• which crew packages are offered on the Labor step,
• which T&C / Services-by-Others sets load on the Proposal step,
• the QuickBooks income account the job will book to — shown right under the field the moment you pick it (choose DAGB and it displays "QuickBooks account: Deep Anode Ground Bed").

MSA

Picking the client's MSA makes its rates and payment terms flow through — labor rates on the Labor step, payment terms on the Proposal. "No MSA / Use Master Rates" falls back to the master rate sheet.

Client Contact

Who the proposal letter is addressed to.

Click Create Bid & Continue. The bid now exists with a quote number and you land on the Takeoff step.

STEP 02 Takeoff

The calculators

Three work types have a dedicated calculator that is the takeoff step. Enter the design; the calculator derives quantities and builds the materials list. Apply to Materials writes those lines onto the Materials step, where they price into the Materials cost center at a 15% default margin.

Everything else — no calculator

The other work types (AC Mitigation V/L, RMU, Test Station, Bond, Rectifier, CIS/Survey, Inspection, Tech Work, Coating & Painting) skip the calculator — build the estimate directly in Labor / Equipment / Materials. Day-rate work such as Inspection and Tech Work is usually just labor day rates plus travel.

Work type reference

A few account mappings — SDAGB, RMU, Bond, Rectifier, Inspection — are pending final confirmation with accounting; the account shown in the app is what the job will book to.

STEP 03 Labor

Build the crew

Two ways to do it:

Crew package chips

At the top of the page, filtered to your work type — DAGB offers Drill-only crew (3-man) and Turnkey crew (5-man + rig). One click adds the whole crew with hours, burdens, and per-diem flags set. Rates land at $0 when there's no MSA or master rate for a classification — the note tells you, and you fill them inline.

The add row

Pick a classification (Field Hand 1–3, Skilled Hand 1–3, Foreman 1–3), then workers, hours, days, and rates. The standard defaults are 8 ST hrs + 4 OT hrs per day, ST burden 1.3, OT burden 1.1.

The line math is exactly Cost Workup 3.0:

Sub Labor 1099

Its own section — description, people, days, day rate. No burden applies; it prices into the Contract Labor cost center.

STEP 04 Equipment

Machines and fuel

Owned equipment

Pick from the equipment catalog or browse the fleet (the real Diamond fleet list) and add units × rate × hours or days.

Rental equipment

Enter units, days, and the vendor's day / week / month rate card. The system picks the cheapest correct rate for the duration — the rule is printed on the page:

Example: a 4-day rental at $1,000/day, $3,000/week prices at $3,000 — the week rate beats 4 × day = $4,000. Rentals price into their own cost center at 15% margin.

Fuel

Click "Seed fuel rows from equipment (n)" and every owned and rental machine gets a fuel row at $4.25/gal (editable). Enter total gallons per machine (e.g. 35 gal/day × 11 days = 385). The From (yard) address is pre-filled with the Tomball yard — enter the job site and Get distance to estimate the travel-leg fuel.

STEP 05 Materials

The bill of materials

The calculator's applied lines live here — all 19 DAGB lines arrive exactly as estimated, $11,373.00. You can also:

• add from the materials catalog or free-form (qty, unit, unit cost, markup %),
• Import from vendor quote (PDF) — auto-fills material lines straight from a vendor's quote document.

STEP 06 Other

Travel & incidentals

Hotels

The system reads your per-diem-flagged crew and does the rooming for you: the foreman gets his own room, everyone else pairs 2 per room, and the odd man out gets his own. A 3-man flagged crew shows "3 travelers → 2 rooms," and one click adds 2 rooms × $175 = $350 at the standard rate. For long jobs, enter an Airbnb weekly rate and number of weeks instead — it replaces the hotel math.

Other Costs

Anything else, categorized: Per Diem, Mobilization, Travel, Compliance, Rental, Subcontractor, or Other. The category matters — Subcontractor-category lines price into the Subcontractors cost center (35%), fuel rows into Fuel, hotels into Travel (Hotels). The workup sorts it all by category.

STEP 07 Workup

The Sell Price Breakdown

This is Cost Workup 3.0 — where costs become a price. Every cost you entered rolls up live into ten cost centers.

For each center, sell = cost ÷ (1 − margin), and you can edit any margin per bid. The sell total rounds up to the next $10 (the workbook's CEILING), tax (default 8.25%, editable) applies to the raw subtotal, and the Project Total is your price.

A worked example

STEP 08 Proposal

The client letter, assembled

• Pricing valid until — defaults to 14 days from bid creation; the PDF prints this date.
• Payment terms — auto-loads from the client's MSA.
• Services Provided by Others — the standard list for your work type. DAGB loads 10 lines: site access/OQ, survey & layout, AC power to the pole, matting, locating, soil testing, waste disposal, security, traffic control, and fire watch. Delete what doesn't apply (✕), add project-specific lines, or reset to the standard set.
• Project Terms & Conditions — your verbatim contract language per work type. DAGB loads 18 lines — non-union, taxes estimated, the tariff clause, the $750/hr hazardous-conditions and hard-formations clauses, the 50-ft extra-lead / no-refund line, Mon–Sat 12s with Sunday DOT reset, and the rest. Same editing rules.
• Additional conditions — free text.

Save & Preview PDF renders the actual letter inline — Diamond letterhead, Attn: your client, the quote number, the OQ commitment paragraph, your Services / T&C lists numbered out, and the pricing schedule. What you see is exactly what the client receives.

STEP 09 Summary

Getting it out the door

The Summary step recaps the bid. The send and approve actions live on the Bid Details page (open the bid from the Jobs & Bids list):

1. Send for Approval — the bid goes to PENDING APPROVAL (amber). Estimators can't approve their own bids by role design; an owner or the office approves.
2. The approver sees Approve and Request Changes (changes requires a reason and returns the bid to draft with the note in the history).
3. Once APPROVED (teal), Submit to Client appears — mark it submitted when the proposal goes out. Approved too soon? The approver also gets Return to Draft (reason required) — use it when a problem surfaces after approval but before the client sees the proposal.
4. On award: Win (enter the PO), then Convert to Job — the job is created with the workup budget attached. A submitted bid that needs re-pricing gets Revise (creates the -R1 copy so the original stays on record).

Every action lands in the Bid History at the bottom of the page — who, what, and when.

Quick answers

Things people ask

Verified live on the Diamond platform

Every figure is real

Each step in this guide was walked start to finish on the live Diamond system — every button clicked, every calculator run, every dollar figure the system actually produced. Nothing below is an illustration.