Glossary of Estimating Terms
This glossary defines the estimating and Stimaro terms used throughout this help center. Terms are grouped by topic, and where a term has a dedicated article, it's noted.
Core estimating concepts
Direct cost — The cost of everything that goes directly into the work: labor, equipment, materials, and subcontractors tied to specific items. The bottom-up total of what a job actually consumes, before markup.
Markup — The percentages added on top of direct cost to reach a bid price, covering overhead, profit, and risk. See Understanding markup.
Overhead — Costs of doing business that aren't tied to a single item. Project overhead is the indirect cost of a specific job (site trailer, project management, temporary facilities); corporate overhead is the cost of running the company (office, insurance, executive salaries), allocated across all bids.
Profit — What the company earns after all costs, direct and indirect, are covered. Applied as a percentage near the end of the markup cascade.
Unit cost — The cost of one unit of an item, calculated as the item's total cost divided by its quantity.
Bid price (or bid unit) — What you charge per unit, after markup — distinct from unit cost, which is what it costs you.
Burden — The added cost on top of a worker's base wage: payroll taxes, workers' compensation, liability insurance, and benefits. A "loaded" or "burdened" labor rate includes these. See Labor rates and prevailing wage.
Building an estimate
Item (or item sheet) — A unit of scope you bid — "furnish and drive steel sheet pile," "concrete cap." Built up from its resources. See Understanding items vs. resources.
Resource — A single cost input applied to an item: a crew, a machine, a material, with a quantity and a rate. The ingredients an item is built from. See Adding resources to an item.
Rate — The unit cost of an input — a crew's daily rate, a machine's daily rate, a material's per-unit price. Rates live in the Rates tab and feed into resources.
Assembly — A reusable, pre-built item or group of resources saved for use across projects. See Building reusable assemblies.
Crew — A saved bundle of labor and equipment resources that can be dropped onto an item in one step.
Production rate — How much work a crew completes in a given time (for example, 100 LF/day) — used to translate quantity into crew time and cost.
Factor — A multiplier applied to a resource quantity, used for adjustments like overtime or difficult conditions.
Quantities and takeoff
Takeoff — The process of measuring quantities of work from project drawings. See Understanding takeoff.
Takeoff quantity — The quantity you actually measured. Bid quantity — the quantity you put on the bid. Usually equal, sometimes deliberately different. See Takeoff quantity vs. bid quantity.
Scale calibration — Telling the software how distances on a plan relate to real-world dimensions, so measured marks produce accurate quantities.
Building the bid
Bid sheet — The grid where your items roll up into a priced proposal, where markup is applied, and where the bid is finalized.
Section — A labeled grouping of bid rows, used to organize a bid and match an owner's bid-form structure. See Organizing your bid with sections.
Write-in — A manual bid row priced directly, with no item sheet or resource detail behind it. See Write-in line items.
Category markup — A markup percentage applied to one cost category (labor, equipment, material, etc.) rather than the whole bid.
Balanced bid vs. actual bid — The balanced bid is what your markup math says the total should be; the actual bid is what your line prices add up to. Auto-Balance (the scale icon ⚖, 'Auto-balance bid units') reconciles them. See Bid balancing.
Bond premium — The fee paid to a surety for a performance and payment bond, usually a percentage of contract value, calculated from a tiered bond table. See Bond tables.
Review, analysis, and quotes
Validation — Stimaro's automated pre-submission check of a bid for completeness, pricing, structural, and bid-day issues. See Using the Validation feature.
Monte Carlo simulation — Running thousands of cost scenarios to estimate the probability that a bid is profitable at a given markup, and to identify which lines drive the most risk.
RFQ (request for quote) — A request sent to a vendor or subcontractor to price specific items, then compared and locked. See Using the RFQ feature.
Prevailing wage — A legally required minimum wage by classification on many publicly funded projects. Davis-Bacon is the federal version. See Labor rates and prevailing wage.
Compliance and reference terms
Schedule of Values — A breakdown of a contract's total into line-item values, used for progress billing (often AIA G702-style).
Cost code — A short label attached to an item for accounting and reporting, matching your job cost system. See Organizing cost codes.
Alternate — An additive or deductive option to the base bid, priced separately so the owner can choose.
Allowance — A sum carried in the bid for work not yet fully defined, often owner-specified.