Free contractor tool
Concrete Job Bid
You already know the cubic yards. This turns that quantity into a bid: material cost, labor, equipment, other direct costs, the overhead you choose to recover, the price you plan to quote and the profit that price actually leaves.
1.Quantity
Type the volume this job pours, or start from a concrete calculator and bring the quantity with you.
The currency your costs are in. RHACOVA never converts: changing it clears the amounts you typed. The estimate is only created in a company that works in this currency.
Only used to name the estimate.
Calculate the cubic yards first and the quantity follows you here.
2.Job costs
Your numbers only. RHACOVA publishes no concrete price, no crew productivity and no equipment rate, because an invented average is worse than a blank field.
What your supplier quoted you. A typed price is your own figure, not verified price evidence.
Hours you expect, from your own history.
Wage plus burden. The Labor Burden Calculator works this out.
Leave a category empty when it does not apply to this job. An empty category is honest; burying a real cost in “other” is not.
3.Price
Cost is a fact. Price is a decision you make.
4.Profit
What this bid costs, charges and leaves.
Why this number?
sellingPrice = cost / (1 - targetMargin)
Inputs
- Job cost
- $0.00
- Target margin
- 0.00%
Results
- Selling price
- $0.00
- Profit
- $0.00
- Margin
- 0.00%
- Markup
- 0.00%
Formula pricing.sellingPriceFromTargetMargin · engine shared.pricing@1.0.0 · core-margin-markup · rounding half-even to 2 decimals.
5.Protect the bid
The same Profit Guard that runs on every RHACOVA estimate, with the same rules and the same severities.
Review recommended before you send this.
No cost on "Concrete — order quantity"
This line has a quantity but its cost per unit is zero.
Work with no cost attached quietly shrinks your real profit.
6.Continue to a RHACOVA Estimate
An account starts here, and only here: saving the bid is the first thing that needs a workspace.
The bid stays on your device until you save it. After sign-in it becomes an ordinary estimate — every line, the quantity, the pricing decision — with nothing to retype, and it can only ever create one estimate.
What a concrete job bid includes
A bid is not a quantity and it is not a price list. It is the whole chain: how much concrete the pour takes, what that concrete costs you, what the labor, equipment, disposal, mobilization and permits cost, how much of your office overhead this job should carry, the price you decide to quote, and the profit that price leaves once all of the above is paid.
Every one of those steps is a different number. Collapsing them is how a busy contractor ends up working for nothing on a job that looked fine on the truck ticket.
Quantity, job cost and selling price are three different things
Quantity is geometry: cubic yards from length, width and thickness, plus the waste allowance you choose and the increment your supplier sells in. It is computed by the same engine that runs the public concrete calculators, so the number here is the number you already saw — not a second calculation.
Job cost is what the job consumes: material, loaded labor, equipment, subcontractors, disposal, mobilization, permits. Add the overhead you choose to recover here and you have the true job cost.
Selling price is a decision. Cost does not set it; you do, through a target margin, a markup on cost, or a number you already gave the customer.
Why labor, equipment and overhead decide the outcome
Concrete is the visible cost, so it is the one contractors price against each other. It is rarely the one that sinks the job. Labor at its loaded cost — wage plus payroll taxes, insurance and the rest of the burden — usually moves more money than the mix. Equipment and mobilization are real whether or not they appear on the invoice. Overhead exists on every working day and has to come out of the jobs you sell.
If you leave a category blank because you do not know it yet, the bid says so instead of filling it with an average. RHACOVA does not publish crew productivity, concrete prices or equipment rates, and it will not guess them for you.
How the expected profit is derived
Direct cost is the sum of the priced lines. Overhead recovery is added exactly as you chose it — a percent of direct cost, dollars per labor hour, or a flat amount — and is shown as its own figure, never mixed into a direct cost and never called profit. The sum is the true job cost.
The selling price is then derived from your pricing decision, and the expected profit is the selling price minus the true job cost. Margin is that profit as a share of the price; markup is it as a share of the cost. Both are shown because they are different numbers and confusing them is expensive. The arithmetic is exact decimal arithmetic, and the same engine prices every RHACOVA estimate.
Full definitions live in the RHACOVA methodology.
What RHACOVA assumes, and what it refuses to assume
It assumes only what you typed and what the geometry says. It does not assume a concrete price, a labor rate, crew productivity, an equipment rate, an overhead percentage, a waste allowance or a target margin. There is no universal right margin, and a tool that hands you one is guessing about your business.
A price you typed is your figure, not verified price evidence. Inside RHACOVA, a supplier quote or your own job history can be attached to a line as price evidence with its own freshness and confidence — a typed number never gets that status.