Every technical consultancy starts with a bid spreadsheet, and most of them are fine. One tab, a row per opportunity, a column for the fee and a column for whether you won it. It costs nothing, it opens instantly, and nobody needs training.
This page is for MDs and partners at small consultancies — structural, civil, M&E, geotech, environmental — who are wondering whether that spreadsheet is still doing its job. It covers where spreadsheets genuinely win, the specific points at which they stop working, and what a dedicated tool changes. If you bid a few jobs a year and price them all yourself, the honest answer is at the top: stay where you are.
When is a spreadsheet still the right answer?
Three situations, and they are not edge cases.
One person prices everything. The single biggest failure mode of a shared spreadsheet is version drift, and it cannot happen if only one person ever opens the file. A sole director bidding their own work has a perfectly good system.
You bid under about ten jobs a year. Below that volume you can hold the whole pipeline in your head. The spreadsheet is a memory aid, not a system of record, and a memory aid is all you need.
Your pricing is genuinely standard. Some firms sell a repeatable package at a rate card that has not moved in two years. If the cost side of every bid is the same arithmetic, a spreadsheet does that arithmetic fine.
If none of those describe you any more, keep reading. If one of them does, bookmark this and come back when you have hired your third engineer.
Where does a bid spreadsheet stop working?
Not gradually. Spreadsheets fail at five specific points, and firms usually hit two or three at once.
Nobody knows which copy is real. The moment a second person prices a bid, the file forks. Someone works on a version in their downloads folder, someone else edits the one on the shared drive, and a fortnight later two people quote the same client different numbers. This is the failure everyone recognises and nobody fixes, because the fix is process discipline and process discipline loses to a busy Tuesday.
There is no floor column. Almost every bid spreadsheet has a fee column and a cost column, and calls the difference margin. That number is a subtraction, not a decision. It does not tell you the lowest fee at which this job is still worth winning, because it usually excludes the cost of writing the bid and always excludes the risks you have not priced. So when the client asks you to sharpen the pencil, you negotiate against a figure that was never the real limit.
The numbers stop at submission. The row is filled in the week you price the job and never touched again. Scope grows during clarifications, the programme slips, two extra coordination meetings appear — none of it goes back into the sheet. Your spreadsheet's version of that project is frozen at its most optimistic moment.
You cannot answer the two questions that matter. What is our win rate, and what is our average margin by job type? A spreadsheet can technically hold this, but only if every row was completed accurately and closed out properly, which in practice they are not. Most firms we speak to have years of bid rows and still cannot say which client type reliably pays.
Bids die quietly. A proposal sent in April sits in row 34 with the status still "submitted". No prompt, no follow-up, no decision to walk away. It is not lost — it is just never thought about again.
Bid management software vs spreadsheets: side by side
| Capability | Spreadsheet | Bidro |
|---|---|---|
| CostPre-launch founding price | Free | £99 one-off, lifetime |
| Setup time | Minutes | Under an hour |
| Flexible to your own formatA real spreadsheet advantage | – | |
| Works offline | – | |
| Single source of truth across the team | – | |
| Margin floor calculated per bid | Manual, if someone builds it | |
| Bid / no-bid score | Gut feel | |
| Win rate tracked automatically | – | |
| Average margin by job type | In theory | |
| Prompts on stalled bids | – | |
| Pricing consistent across estimators | Whoever built the sheet decides |
Cost
Pre-launch founding price
- Spreadsheet
- Free
- Bidro
- £99 one-off, lifetime
Setup time
- Spreadsheet
- Minutes
- Bidro
- Under an hour
Flexible to your own format
A real spreadsheet advantage
- Spreadsheet
- Bidro
- –
Works offline
- Spreadsheet
- Bidro
- –
Single source of truth across the team
- Spreadsheet
- –
- Bidro
Margin floor calculated per bid
- Spreadsheet
- Manual, if someone builds it
- Bidro
Bid / no-bid score
- Spreadsheet
- Gut feel
- Bidro
Win rate tracked automatically
- Spreadsheet
- –
- Bidro
Average margin by job type
- Spreadsheet
- In theory
- Bidro
Prompts on stalled bids
- Spreadsheet
- –
- Bidro
Pricing consistent across estimators
- Spreadsheet
- Whoever built the sheet decides
- Bidro
Note what is not in that table. Bidro does not draft your proposal, does not find you work, and does not manage delivery after the win. If that is what you are shopping for, this is the wrong tool and you should keep looking.
What does the missing floor column actually cost?
Here is the arithmetic on one job. An M&E building services package for a school refurbishment. Fee on the table: £28,000.
This is what the spreadsheet holds on the day it is priced:
| Input | Figure |
|---|---|
| Delivery days | 34 |
| Blended day cost | £540 |
| Labour cost | £18,360 |
| Non-recoverable expenses | £900 |
| Cost | £19,260 |
| Margin | £8,740 (31%) |
Thirty-one per cent. The cell goes green. You bid it, you win it, and everyone agrees it was a good job.
Now here is what happened afterwards, none of which went back into the sheet:
| What changed | Cost |
|---|---|
| Small power distribution scope added during clarifications | 4 days · £2,160 |
| Writing the proposal itself | 3 senior days · £1,620 |
| Two extra coordination meetings after the architect's revision | 2 days · £1,080 |
| Real cost | £24,120 |
Actual margin: £28,000 − £24,120 = £3,880. That is 14%, not 31%. Still a profitable job — but less than half what the spreadsheet claimed, and the spreadsheet still says 31% today, which is how the next school gets priced exactly the same way.
Now set a proper floor. Your true break-even is the cost plus the bid you had to write to get it: £19,260 + £1,620 = £20,880. Add a modest allowance for the scope drift you know this client type produces — call it £1,600 — and your floor is £22,480.
The £28,000 package, on one bar
£20,880
True break-even
£22,480
Margin floor
£24,000
Discount ask
£28,000
Quoted fee
Then the client rings and asks for £24,000.
Against the spreadsheet, that looks comfortable: £24,000 − £19,260 leaves £4,740, still around 20%. Say yes. Against the floor, the same request leaves £1,520 — about 6% — and one slipped week from nothing. Same job, same client, same number. Two completely different decisions, and the spreadsheet quietly argues for the wrong one.
The floor has to be written down before the fee is quoted. A walk-away number worked out during the negotiation is not a floor, it is a mood.
Can't I just add a floor column to my spreadsheet?
Yes. The formula is a subtraction and an allowance, and you could build it this afternoon. Anyone telling you this needs software is selling you something.
The problem is not the formula. It is that the column only does its job if it gets filled in honestly on every bid, including the one priced at six o'clock on a Friday when the deadline is Monday and the client is chasing. A spreadsheet has no opinion about whether you skipped a cell. It will happily hand you a fee with the floor blank, and nothing downstream will ever flag it.
That is the real difference, and it is worth being precise about it: the spreadsheet is not worse at maths. It is worse at insisting. A system that will not let you record a decision without a floor produces floors on every bid. A template that politely suggests one produces floors on the bids where you were not in a hurry — which are not the bids that hurt you.
The same goes for the follow-up nobody makes and the outcome nobody logs. None of these are capability problems. They are all the same problem: the discipline lives in someone's head, and heads have bad weeks.
What does moving off the spreadsheet actually involve?
Less than you would expect, because Bidro is not trying to replace the spreadsheet's whole job.
There is no migration project. Start by entering only the opportunities that are currently live — for most firms that is somewhere between five and fifteen, and it takes under an hour. Closed bids from previous years can be added later, or never; they are history, and the value is in what you decide next.
Keep the spreadsheet if you want to. Plenty of firms run both for the first month, which is a reasonable way to find out whether the floor is telling you something the sheet was not. The comparison to make is not against zero — it is against the margin on one job you priced without a floor.
The workflow is four steps: capture the opportunity, score whether it is worth bidding, set the floor, then log what happened. That last step is the one spreadsheets never get, and it is the one that makes the next twelve bids better.
Questions we get asked
Is a spreadsheet good enough for tracking bids? For a firm bidding a handful of jobs a year with one person pricing them, yes — see the top of this page. It starts costing you when several people edit it, when the numbers stop being updated after submission, and when nobody can say what your win rate is.
What if my pricing is genuinely bespoke every time? Then the floor matters more, not less. Bespoke pricing is exactly where the cost of the bid itself and the risk allowance go missing.
Do I lose the flexibility of my own format? Some of it, yes. That is a real trade and the table above says so. What you get back is that everyone is looking at the same numbers.
What does it cost? £99 one-off for lifetime access during the pre-launch period, including future updates. Pricing is on the homepage.
The short version
A bid spreadsheet is not a bad tool. It is an honest one that only knows what you last told it, and the thing it is never told is what the job actually cost you.
If you want the reasoning behind the floor itself, read how to price risk into a fixed fee. If you want to know whether your firm is the shape Bidro is built for, the use cases page is blunt about who it is not for.
Otherwise: open your spreadsheet, pick the last job you won, and work out what it really cost including the days you spent writing the proposal. If that number surprises you, the spreadsheet was never the problem — the missing column was.