I hope these thoughts will help some of you painters out there. Below are some thoughts about tracking your daily reports.

We are all aware of the need to track, early and often, how our crews are performing on each job. This task can be made fairly simple by using time cards, which you can purchase or create yourself. These don’t need to be terribly sophisticated, just basic spread sheets that you can populate with the project information and rows which depict each task and the hours estimated for them. One suggestion is that you use the first column to assign a code to each task. When your foremen fill out their time cards, they should indicate the code that each employee was working on for that day. For example, the first column and row of the time card would have code 101 (Or any number of your choice). Moving to the right, the next cell would indicate “paint walls”, the next would show the hours used that day for painting walls and the next one, the total number of hours that were estimated for that task. The last cell should be for the percentage of the total that has been completed to date. Each day’s time card can be totaled weekly, and used to populate a Job Phase Overview Report. This lists, by codes, the total number of hours used on the job to date, compared to the estimate, and shows the differences. This makes it very easy to spot where you are winning or losing. The Job Phase Overview Report can be used in weekly production meetings to help your team evaluate the progress of each of your projects and to determine any necessary adjustments.

One other tool I would suggest is the use of Daily Reports. An accurate set of daily reports from a job will arm you with information that can help when bidding future work. Another benefit derived from the practice of keeping daily reports, is that they can serve as activity reports, should you need to refer to them at a future date. It’s not unheard of for a general contractor or owner to come to you during the course of a project, and question you as to what may or may not have been done on any given day. With your daily reports in hand, you have documented evidence of the number of people you working on any given day and what tasks they performed, material purchases, temperature and dew point readings, any conditions or events that may have impacted your production, documentation of directions from or correspondence with the customer and any other information you choose to include.

These reports can all be generated as easily as using a spiral notebook and handwriting, using a shared Google spreadsheet or a number of apps on the market. The important thing is to track and monitor everything you do. I hope this has been helpful for those of you struggling to keep up.

Submitted by Student Painters (website)

The first step to any bid is of course to gather the quantities, whether you are measuring an existing structure or doing a takeoff from a set of plans. From there you must “extend” your numbers, either manually or by entering the information into an estimating program.

Once you have your calculations completed, there are still a few things to consider before the bid is ready to submit. Let’s look at some of these variables that can influence how you want to present any given bid, or if you want to bid the project at all.

As a preface, let me say that my focus here will be on bidding to general contractors, but many of these principals apply to bidding from plans dealing directly with owners as well.

First, you must determine what type of bid this is going to be. There are basically three types; negotiated, select, and competitive. Of these three, the negotiated bid is the most desirable. In this situation, an owner will choose which general contractor they want to run their project and negotiate a price with that company. With the negotiated bid, in addition to the price, your reputation for honesty, quality and how easy you are to work with can be deciding factors.

The select bid is the next best situation to find yourself in. It is similar to the negotiated bid, but rather than choosing one single general contractor, the owner will comprise a list of a select few that will be asked to bid on the project; usually three. As with the first example, your chances of winning such a bid are still better than with the typical, open or competitive bid.

The competitive bid is probably the most common of the three I have mentioned. This is when an owner puts a project out to bid on the open market so to speak. Your chances of winning a competitive bid are statistically the smallest. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bother bidding on them, but it is something to take into consideration.

The distance your crew and you have to travel to a job can have more of an impact than just the travel time involved. The distance to the nearest paint store, should you need supplies, can be a factor. What if you experience equipment failure? Supervision becomes a more difficult task as well. In light of such possibilities, you may want to increase your bid accordingly.

Basically, high quality work goes for a premium. “Blow and go” production type jobs don’t. If you know that a high level of craftsmanship is going to be required on a job, you will need to adjust your bid to account for the extra attention that will be demanded.

Assume you are bidding an interior repaint of a school, it is summer and the contract documents stipulate that the work must be completed before school resumes session. They further stipulate that if you are not done by the deadline, that you must finish the work during evenings or on weekends, and/or liquidated damages will be charged to you for failing to meet the schedule; these can be substantial. These added constraints add a risk factor that again commands a higher rate than typical jobs.

These jobs are typically for federal, state, or city agencies, or for schools. With prevailing wage jobs, you will experience increased expenses for your bookkeeping needs, as you will often be required to submit “certified payrolls”, and see to it that your crews are paid weekly and at the prevailing wage required.

Who are these people? Have you worked with them before? Were they easy to work with? Did they pay on time? Did they honor your change orders? Were they difficult to please? Did they interpret the plans differently than you did? All these are legitimate questions to ask yourself.

How full is your plate? If you presently have a substantial amount of work in progress, you may decide not to bid any additional work. If you choose to do so, you should bid it at a premium rate. You don’t want to submit a ridiculously high number, but you clearly have the option in this case to make the extra work well worth your while.

OK, so you’ve submitted your bid, and you’re wondering how you did. In the case of “sealed bids”, there is typically a bid opening that anyone can attend to find out immediately who won. If you are the prime contractor on a project, you can typically contact the issuing authority and ask who won the bid. If you were bidding as a subcontractor, you can call and see which of the general contractors was the “apparent low” bidder. Once you know which firm won the bid, you can call them, congratulate them, and asked if they “listed” you for the painting.

Submitted by Broomfield painting.