Control electrical tender pricing without losing sight of the wider bid.

Different jobs. Often complementary. An estimator or QS builds up a price from drawings, quantities, labour and materials — that build-up is what goes into the numbers a contractor decides to submit. BidLayer does not do that build-up and does not calculate or suggest any rate. What it does is make sure the schedule those numbers eventually get entered into is fully understood: which rates the buyer has actually asked for, in what units, against what quantities, and where those figures sit relative to the rest of the tender's requirements, quality questions and deadlines.

That distinction matters because electrical tender pricing schedules rarely map cleanly onto a standard estimate. A Schedule of Rates for a domestic and communal EICR programme might ask for a unit rate per property, a separate rate per communal board, an hourly rate for supervisors and electricians, a fixed emergency callout charge, an hourly out-of-hours multiplier, a percentage mark-up on materials and a standalone annual management fee — all in one workbook, often across several tabs, with no single place that says "here is the full pricing structure". Missing one of those lines, or pricing it against the wrong unit, is a commercial error that has nothing to do with how well the job itself was estimated.

Notice how few of those nine lines share a unit. A per-property EICR rate, a per-installation consumer unit rate, an hourly labour rate, a fixed emergency charge and an annual management fee cannot be reduced to a single "price per job" figure — and buyers usually score completeness of the schedule as part of the price evaluation, not just the bottom-line total. BidLayer surfaces each requested pricing line individually, with a link back to where it appears in the tender pack, so a gap in the schedule is visible before submission rather than after clarifications close.

Where a tender splits quality and price — commonly a 60/40 or 70/30 weighting — BidLayer's Pricing workspace sits alongside the wider tender workspace covering requirements, eligibility and quality questions, so commercial completeness can be checked against the same submission deadline the rest of the response is working to.

This is not complete workbook automation. Some pricing workbooks are built with layouts that don't process automatically — heavy merged-cell formatting, images embedded in place of text, protected sheets with no visible structure, or pricing tables built as pictures rather than data. Where a workbook can't be read reliably, BidLayer identifies it for manual review rather than presenting a silently incomplete pricing picture.

Where a workbook is supported, every pricing line BidLayer identifies carries a source reference — sheet name and cell, in the same way a PDF requirement carries a page and clause reference — so the person populating the schedule with actual rates can go straight to the right cell rather than re-reading five tabs to find it again.

A 60-property gap between two documents changes the effective unit economics of a fixed-price EICR programme. BidLayer flags this kind of discrepancy against the source location in each document so the commercial lead can decide which figure to price against, or raise it as a formal clarification with the buyer before the clarification deadline closes. BidLayer does not decide which figure is correct and does not adjust either document — that judgement, and any resulting clarification question, stays with the bid team.

The same principle applies to rate structures, not just quantities: if a framework schedule requests a single blended labour rate in one appendix but separate electrician and supervisor rates in another, that's a structural conflict worth surfacing before pricing begins, not after submission.

None of this is commercial or legal advice, and BidLayer does not draft assumptions or exclusions on the bidder's behalf — it gives the team a structured place to write them down and keep them attached to the pricing line and source document they qualify. That matters at submission, when an evaluator or auditor may ask why a price was built the way it was, and it matters again if the contract is awarded and the priced assumptions need to be checked against what was actually agreed.

Because assumptions, clarifications and pricing sit in the same workspace as requirements and quality responses, a change discovered late — a revised asset count, an amended out-of-hours definition — is visible against everything else the bid depends on, not isolated in a spreadsheet nobody else on the team has open.