Takeoff and price any job, up to 80% faster.
Create winning bids in less than half the time
Excellent 1:1 training and support
Designed to make estimating easy for tradies
Here’s a question for you. You’re an Australian electrician. You don’t have any electrical estimating software to work with. And you need to quote on a job for someone building a mid-sized office. How long’s it going to take you to get an accurate number?
We’re talking hours, not minutes. Long hours of measuring all the containment, counting all the sockets, double checking your takeoff to make sure you’ve not missed a single electrical switch. Speaking of which, you’ve got to scale those plans before the takeoff starts. And before that, you’ve got to go to a printer and spend your hard earned dollars.
One quote, and we’re looking at five hours. That’s what the contractors we work with tell us anyway. Five hours that could be spent actually working (or watching some Aussie Rules with a beer – it’s your life). Seems like a massive pain in the backside.
So we built some software that makes the computer do all the boring bits for you so you can get your quotes out five times quicker.
RapidBid’s electrical estimating software is going to save you time and have you first in and best dressed on every project. Scale with a couple of clicks, let autocounting functions handle the fiddly bits, and drop all the numbers this puts out into your quote spreadsheet. How simple does that sound?
“I have a mate who is an electrical contractor and he was telling me that he spent three weeks pricing a $200,000 job by hand. I told him that with my estimating and PDF take off software, I started a $700,000 job yesterday and finished it today!”
“As much as I would hate to help any of my competitors, I have to completely endorse RapidBid in all that it offers for a business. Our quotation rate has increased from 50 to over 200 quotations per month.”
“RapidBid is a lifesaver. It’s so easy to use, I just open the drawings and within minutes I have scaled, marked and priced up all my materials and labour. It has increased the speed that we can win work four times over, at least.”
“At last, take-offs for the 21st century! After years spent marking up drawings with highlighters and producing takeoff sheets, this is a revolution in estimating. Just can’t live without it – I now takeoff five projects in the time it used to take to do just one.”
“RapidBid easily saves me 90% of my takeoff time, so it’s extremely useful for projects that need a quick turnaround. Brilliant software that is so easy to use.”
“Now, overall from top to bottom, RapidBid’s software saves me about 70% of my time, and that makes an amazing difference. Quotes that took me five days before now take me less than two days, and I’ve only been estimating since January.”
“I work as an estimator Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5, and your software and support is first class. I can takeoff and price well over 10 drawings in less than an hour, this used to take me half a day before! I just love how simple it is.”
We used to do takeoffs with a scale ruler and a pencil which was very time consuming, and now we have a much quicker takeoff time. We only spend around 1 or 2 hours doing takeoffs with RapidBid’s software and before it used to take us about 5 or 6 hours.
“We used to have a three or four-process estimate which was over-complicated, but now we have a simple, one-process estimate. We definitely recommend!”
“Time saving is the biggest advantage for us by far. RapidBid saved us about 80% of our time and increased our productivity 50%.”
Putting your bid in for a job’s hard work. We all wish we could glance at the plans, eyeball it to guess how much cable and wiring the job needs, throw in the price of a fusebox and add the rates for paying our tradies.
Reckon that’s going to fly with a big customer?
When you hand over your guesstimate, and your competition passes a full quote with accurate quantities, it’s pretty clear who’s getting the job. So instead, you’ve got to spend time going through every minute detail of the job.
First the drawings need sorting out. They’re always sent to you in a ZIP file with a bunch of other plans that you don’t need – so you’re left to waste time clicking in, checking it’s right, clicking out, ditching this one, copying that one, all so you’ve got the right electrical plans to take to the printer. Who’s going to ask for even more of your hard earned cash.
Printer paid, and it’s back to the office for with a pile of full-size drawings. Off to the table, and it’s time for the ruler so you can scale every cable, the highlighter so you can colour every socket, and a dose of eye strain while you count every fuse and jot it all down on your take off sheet. Eventually, you’ve got the numbers for the quantities.
At least you’re done now, right?
As if. You’ve got to drop those numbers into your spreadsheet, then drop in the latest prices from your electrical suppliers (who always change the price of something), add in your prices from your rate sheet before every tradie’s favourite job. Checking the maths.
Five hours, used up, just like that. It’s just about fine if you win the job after all this, but we all know not every quote turns into a paid contract.
You need a better way.
RapidBid is that better way. We hand as much of that process as we can to a computer, which does the counting and the adding for you. Same prices as doing it by hand, but far less messing about with your pencil case.
Let’s start this whole process again. This time, we’re going to get it done before the game starts, and you’re going to get your evening back. We promise.
And not just one evening, if our savings calculator is to be believed. And it is.
First up – ZIP file full of drawings. Never mind the clicking, just load up RapidBid. Our software pre-loads all those drawings and turns everything into a yes/no question. Plans for a ground floor, packed with wires and light fittings? Yes please. Plans for some decking? Nothing to do with you, so no thanks.
Half a minute, and you’ve got a folder full of the drawings you need to do your electrical estimate. So now it’s time to scale. You’re doing it on-screen, so you’ll have to apologise to your printer. Your days of putting his kids through university are done.
Now we’re looking at the plans, it’s time to make life easy.
RapidBid clears away all the background detail so you only see what you need for your takeoff. Find the symbol for a socket, a couple of clicks, and the auto counting feature will give you a total in the blink of an eye (we’ve seen RapidBid count all the light fittings for a showroom in 0.468 seconds – good luck counting quicker than that).
Do that a few more times for other materials, and RapidBid’s got your numbers. It fires them over to your spreadsheet, you drop in the prices and rates, and everything’s automatically added up.
Well done. You’ve got your quote ready to send, and there’s plenty of time to kick the dog off the couch.
You’ve saved four hours. You’ve saved whatever you were paying your printer, and now you can either quote on another electrical project (more quotes = more business) or just finish early and put your feet up.
We didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to invent RapidBid.
We’ve been making electrical estimating software for tradies and contractors since before your average Aussie even had a computer, and RapidBid’s just the next step in our plan to make lives easier.
But we didn’t just decide we’re great and release our software. We found someone who could test everything for us. Someone so impartial, we had to head to a whole other continent.
We hired the University of California, Los Angeles’ professor of business psychology and we asked him to put together a focus group to test out our estimating software.
Without boring you with his report (it’d take longer to read than takeoff a plan), his focus group loved RapidBid. They were stressed by putting together electrical estimates without the computer’s help – and now they’re not.
Here’s some numbers:
Don’t trust the eggheads? Try it for yourself. If you’re happy, sign up to one of our packages. They’re cheaper than you’d think.
We offer three RapidBid packages to electrical contractors around Australia, and the most expensive of those packages will cost you about five bucks a day. They charge more than that for a beer in Melbourne.
Even the basic package includes a full walkthrough to help you learn how to use the software, telephone and screen-sharing support if you ever get stuck, and instant updates to ensure you’re up to date with all the latest features.
Speed up your quotes by testing out RapidBid electrical estimating software. Just sign up to our mailing list and send us a message about trying out the new version of the platform. It’s all that simple.
