How to Estimate Electrical Work

Understanding what jobs you will profit from based on your company's ability is everything. The sooner you realize that you can pass up work the better off you'll be. You are in this to make money for your company. So bid accordingly and let your skills shine.

Spec's for a job will inform your payment process, you material requirements and job scope DO NOT SKIP THEM OVER. Always ask for clarification if you're unsure of any aspect of the job you're bidding on. 

Tender Issued Date, all other trade drawings to cross-reference if there will be installation issues and submit any concerns (RFI). Its important that any issues are noted early on so you can accurately account for them in your estimate.

The majority of your estimated cost is generated from the Take-off, so having accurate quantities of devices, conduit layouts and Feeder lengths is extremely important. Creating a methodical method like only counting one type of lighting fixture or device at a time will ensure accuracy. It's important to triple-check your counts and ensure all electrical systems have been accounted for. 

Once you have your take-off counts done, you'll need a Estimate Template with all the fields listed here that either you create or buy.  Based on the take-off you can now build an assembly for each device, conduit layout or Feeder run. An assembly is all the material required X the Labor Units associated with each via the standard Neca Labor amounts ( https://ceca.org/publications/manual-of-labor-units-mlu/ )( https://www.necanet.org/education/publications/neca-manual-of-labor-units-(mlu) ). The Neca values are per/Foot, per/item/ etc= the total hours of the installation time. This is our Bible for matching material with labor costs and a must for an estimator to own.  Once all assemblies are accounted for get external material pricing so as to ensure material cost is accurate and try to get the wholesaler to guarantee the pricing for when the project starts. Next add your actual labor costs- per hour rate X man hours (from above)  + Burden ( cost per hour of unemployement, government pension etc) + Fringe (benefits are additions to employee compensation, such as paid time off or use of a company car. etc) = Total Labor. Now add your total material cost + Total Labor cost and you have the base job cost.

External Material package pricing (labor would be accounted for in assemblies but not the item itself), Sub- Contractor pricing, etc all are external job cost

Site Storage, insurance, your actual time estimating, project manager time, equipment- depreciation, tools- expendable etc. All are direct job costs that have to be accounted for. 

Your job is to ensure you profit but you also have to know what your overhead costs are. Simply put Overhead is the monthly/yearly fixed costs of running your business expressed as a percentage. If you don't know this because you have no historical data to tell you then you'll have to predict it. If you predict as an example you will do $1,000,000 in revenue and your total costs of running your business ( office, staff- in office, insurance, vehiles for office staff etc) is $150,000 then your Overhead is 15%. DO NOT ADD ALREADY ACCOUNTED FOR PROJECT LABOR OR MATERIALS- this is strickly all other cost not fixed into your estimates. Now you can add your Profit %.  Knowing the market, the amount of other contractors submitting estimates on the same job will highly impact the Profit margin you can apply. 

Once you have your totalls you now want to put tem inot lefal form via a Proposal. This is where you really want to dot your "i's" and cross you "t's". Make sure all amounts are correct, that the drawings you based everything on are the latest AND NOTE the TENDER ISSUE DATE ON the Proposal with the Spec issue date. Its alos a good idea to not all the pages of the drawings and NOTE WHATS NOT INCLUDED- like electrcial systems or sub-contractor work you havent included.  This document is legal and you will be bound to it so makesure it is 100% accurate to what your are proposing. 

We can't express this enough, review and double-check everything.  

You've done all that you can now it's time to submit. Generally, on bigger projects, there is a time restriction on when you can submit. Also,  beware that sometimes wholesalers don't release their package pricing until a few hours before the bid submission time. 

If possible reach out and ask how your bid placed amongst your competitors so you can adjust your future bids and get a sense of where the market is to maximize profitibily.