Estimating app for general contractors

General contracting is the hardest estimate to build on site, and the reason is scope rather than size. A GC walkthrough crosses six trades in twenty minutes: demolition, framing, plumbing, electrical, drywall, paint. Nothing about that is hard to price individually. The difficulty is holding all of it in your head while the homeowner talks, and the line you forget is the line you eat.

What gets left off general contractor estimates?

These are the four that cost money most often. None of them are pricing mistakes - they are lines that were never written down.

The trade you did not walk

Every GC has a trade they think in and a trade they forget. If you came up framing, the electrical line is thin. If you came up finish, the structural surprises are. It is consistent enough per person to be predictable.

Demolition and disposal

The tear-out gets priced. Hauling what comes out of it frequently does not, and a full bathroom gut fills a dumpster nobody wrote a line for.

Access, protection and the parts nobody bills

Floor protection, dust walls, moving the homeowner's things, and parking. On an occupied remodel these are real days across a job and they rarely appear as a line.

The sequencing gap

Trades waiting on trades. If the electrician cannot start until the framer finishes and the framer slips two days, that is your cost, not theirs, and nothing in a line-item estimate captures it.

What do general contractors actually estimate?

The kind of line a general contractor estimate is actually made of. Each one is a separate item with its own labor and material, because a line that groups two things together is a line you can only argue about.

Gut demolition of full bathroom
Complete wood framing for carport structure
Install luxury vinyl tile (LVT) flooring throughout house
Replace interior doors
Convert bathtub to shower enclosure
Install LED recessed ceiling light fixtures in living room

GC estimates mix units in a way single-trade estimates do not - square feet for flooring, linear feet for trim, each for fixtures, hours for labor. Any tool that forces one unit across a job is fighting the work.

How BidWalk handles it

You walk the job and talk through it the way you would to an apprentice. BidWalk turns that into itemised lines with labor and material separated, each one marked with where its price came from - your own price book, or an AI estimate. You check every line and set the final number. It does not price the job for you. It makes sure you did not walk past anything.

Common questions

How do general contractors estimate a job?

Walk the scope trade by trade, price each as its own line with labor and material split, then add overhead and margin across the whole job rather than per line. The failure mode is not bad pricing - it is missing a line entirely.

How many line items should a contractor estimate have?

More than most have. A full bathroom gut runs 20 to 30 lines once demolition, disposal, rough-in, finish and patching are each written down. An estimate with five lines has grouped things together, and grouped lines are where scope goes missing.

Should a GC price each trade separately or as one number?

Separately on your side, then present however the customer wants. A single number is easier to hand over and impossible to defend when one trade runs over, because you cannot show which part moved.