Kill the spreadsheet that prices your business.
Your bid model is the most important file in the company. It has three people's edits in it, nobody has tested it, and the person who built it left. One broken formula prices three years of work wrong.
SAOne equation. The whole model behind it.
A bid is built from labour, management, periodic works, services, equipment and consumables. The engine rolls up the service cost and applies one equation:
The builder covers the whole model, including the parts generic software has never heard of: pay rates and on-costs, employer National Insurance including the below-secondary-threshold path, holiday and bank-holiday pay, the apprenticeship levy, auto-enrolment pension, management lines, periodic machine hire, mileage and permits, equipment finance, and consumables tiers driven by occupancy and floor area.
It will not let you price a losing bid.
It blocks a bid priced below the statutory wage floor. It warns on the Real and London Living Wage. It blocks when overhead plus profit reach one hundred percent. An optional margin floor blocks approval below a net margin you set. Edit any figure on an approved bid and it returns to review, so the guardrails are re-checked before sign-off.
The spreadsheet never stopped you. This does.
Three years, four scenarios, one budget.
A three-year plan compounds pay-rise and inflation escalation across years one to three. A target-price goal-seek takes a client's stated budget and solves back to the implied margin or hours, so you know before you commit rather than after. A scenario compare lays four priced bids side by side. Rate cards are versioned, cloneable and retirable, so a re-price uses a known, dated set of assumptions rather than whatever happened to be in the file last time.
Mark it won. It becomes a live contract.
One action creates the client, the contract, a site unit per costing site with occupancy and floor area carried across, a service plan, recurring task definitions from the periodic works, and unassigned weekly shift patterns for the labour. Nothing is re-typed, so nothing drifts. What you sold is what you deliver, and the number you priced is the number you are measured against.
No workforce app can price a tender. The one cleaning platform that offers bidding sells it as a separate product, on a separate website, in a separate database. That is not the same thing.