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Get started with Costimate.
From your first sign-in to your first paid invoice, one step at a time.
Start here
- What Costimate doesA short tour of how a tender notice becomes a lead, a bid, a project and an invoice in Costimate, and what sits around them.
- Create your companySign up, confirm your email address with a code, join your colleagues or create your company, choose a plan and set up your company profile.
- The welcome: set up in eight stepsAfter you sign up, a short welcome fills in what your company profile still needs, your team, your clients and your page settings.
- Find your way aroundThe left menu and how it narrows to a record, the top bar, search, notifications, notes, page width, and light and dark.
- Invite your team and choose rolesInvite members, accept colleagues who ask to join, give each a role, change one person's access, make roles of your own, and decide who sees prices and pay.
- Plans, seats and billingWhat Free includes, how the paid plans follow your seats, how to add seats or change how you pay, what happens when a subscription ends, and where Stripe's invoices are.
- Your profile and sign-inYour own profile, your password, two-factor authentication and passkeys. What each one does, and who reads what is on your profile.
- GlossaryThe words Costimate and these pages use, each in a line, with the page that says more.
Find work
- Find tendersBring in tender notices from TED, SAM.gov, UK Find a Tender and UK Contracts Finder as leads, and turn the right ones into opportunities.
- Public buyersFind the public bodies that tender your kind of work, add them as clients, follow them so their new tenders arrive as leads, and make a lead or a bid of an open tender.
- Work a leadRead a lead, decide whether to bid, dismiss it if you will not, and convert the right ones into opportunities.
Win the bid
- Opportunities and stagesCreate an opportunity, know its type, and move it through its stages with approvals, to won, lost or not pursued.
- The opportunities listNarrow your bids by status, type, client, owner or date, lay them out as a table or a board, save the filters you use, act on several at once, and take the list to Excel.
- Plan the captureMake the case for bidding in seven steps that Costimate fills in for you to confirm, score the bid, send your recommendation to the approver, and see what the warning at Decision means.
- Read the tender with AILet AI read the tender's files and list everything you must hand in, with its deadline, limits and weighting, then check the list and keep it as the bid's checklist.
- Write the technical proposalBuild the technical proposal section by section, written here or uploaded as a PDF, with what your library holds and drafts from AI, then print it as one PDF.
- Price the bidBuild the cost of a bid in its commercial proposal, line by line from your rate card, with sub-lines, labor, subcontractors and PMO.
- Mark-ups, approval and the final priceSend the costs for approval, set the mark-ups that make the selling price, finalise the proposal and print it for the client, and make a new revision when something changes.
- Fill the client's pricing formUpload the client's own Excel pricing form, fill it by hand or from your proposal with AI, and download it back as their file with your prices in.
- Suppliers and market research for a bidList the suppliers who would provide parts of a bid and what each quoted, take a quote into your proposal, and ask AI who else will bid, who could supply, and what the buyer is like.
- Tasks, files and the activity of a bidGive out the work of a bid and talk about it on its task, keep its documents in folders, and read everything that happened in one log.
- Submit and follow upCheck what may still be missing, move the bid to Submitted with the day the client is expected to decide, answer the client's questions round by round, and follow the bid to its decision.
- Won, lost or appointed: what followsWhat each ending of a bid asks for and what it makes: a project, an agreement, the tender that follows, or a record of who won instead.
- Your rate cardYour company's rate card in Commercial settings, which every bid copies when its pricing starts, with the templates of service lines and the scorecard of the bid decision.
Agreements
- Frameworks and long-term agreementsA framework or long-term agreement is appointed, never won. Record the appointment, its term and lots, extend it, and prepare its re-tender when its end comes.
- Agreed rates and changesRead the rates agreed with the client version by version, put a change to the client of a long-term agreement, and record its answer.
- Call-offs and purchase ordersCall work off under a running agreement as a task order or a mini-competition, record a purchase order the client sent, and see what has been called off.
Deliver
- Projects: budget, cost and profitWhere a project comes from, its budget, its actual cost and its forecast at completion, the contract value and the profit, and completing a project.
- Crew and payPut people on a project for the days they work on it, record what they earn, change their pay from a day, and know who sees pay and who does not.
- The schedulePlan who works when on a project, day by day or by a pattern, see where a shift is short, swap shifts, and send the week to the crew.
- Equipment, materials and Company AssetsKeep your vehicles and machines in one register, put them on projects, record their maintenance, see what they are worth today, and take products from stock for a project.
- Expenses and fixed costsRecord what a project spends and have it approved, add the costs that run every month, and change an amount from a day without touching the months that have passed.
- My shiftsSee your own shifts across your company's projects, your next one and your hours this week, and how to ask for a swap.
Get paid
- QuotationsMake a quotation from a finalised commercial proposal or by hand, send it by email or mark it as sent, record the client's answer, and turn an accepted one into an invoice.
- Invoices and paymentsMake an invoice for a project or from a quotation, issue and send it, record what the client pays, confirm its payment reminders, and correct it once it was sent.
- Credit notesTake back part or all of an invoice with a document of its own, see what it does to what is due, give back what was overpaid, and cancel one made by mistake.
- Payment remindersSet when your company reminds clients of what they owe, confirm each invoice's reminders once, and stop them for an invoice, a client or everyone.
- Supplier billsRecord what your suppliers bill you, let AI read the bill for you, approve it for payment, record what you paid, and link it to a project's expense.
- The finance overview and currenciesSee what clients were billed, paid and owe, and what you owe suppliers, in one currency, and how amounts in several currencies are added up.
- Send documents from your own addressVerify your company's domain, then send quotations, invoices, credit notes and reminders from billing@ or from each person's own address.
- Your brand and document templatesKeep your logos, colours and fonts in one place, choose how your proposals and invoices look, and make new templates from a description or a document you already have.
Records
- ClientsKeep the buyers you bid for: what kind of buyer each one is, its details and people, its bids and what they come to, and its public tenders.
- ContactsKeep the people at your clients, suppliers, competitors and event organizers, who looks after each of them, and what you learnt about them.
- Meeting minutesRecord who met, what was said and agreed, who does what by when, and which bids it concerns, and print the minutes as a PDF.
- Suppliers and productsKeep who you buy from, with their bank accounts and what they quoted on your bids, and the catalogue of what you buy, with its stock and its prices.
- CompetitorsKeep who you bid against, the bids where you met them, how often they beat you, and what you know about them.
- Events and organizersKeep the exhibitions and conferences you take part in, who runs them, who went, what they cost, and print an event's details.
- Import and export with ExcelDownload any list as Excel, fill a template to add records in one go, update records you already have, and read what an import refused.
- Restore something deletedFind a record someone deleted, see who deleted it and when, and bring it back where it was, with what it was linked to.
People
- EmployeesKeep your people's records: their work, their contact details and files, who reads their personal details and pay, and how a person gets a login.
- Leave TrackerApply for leave for yourself or record it for an employee, approve or reject it, read each person's balance, see who is away on a calendar, and keep your public holidays.
- Experts you work withFind an expert of the Costimate Expert Network, invite them to a bid on agreed terms, ask them to sign and to send papers, approve their time, and review their work.
Your company
- Company profileYour company's details, the legal entities your documents are issued by and their bank accounts, how your invoices are numbered and reminded, and what the profile still misses.
- Certificates, marketing documents and the technical libraryKeep once the papers every tender asks for: certificates and insurances, brochures and case studies, policies and method statements, and how AI finds or drafts them.
- Services and industriesThe lists your records pick from: the industries you and your clients work in, and the services you offer by category, with AI to suggest some.
- Workflow: decisions waiting for youOne list of every decision that waits in your company, stage moves, costs, sign-offs, expenses, bills, leave, swaps and more, with what you need to decide each without opening it.
- DashboardsThe dashboard you open on: Minimal and Advanced, your default, the filters by industry, owner and period, and a dashboard of your own you arrange yourself.
AI
- What AI does here, and never doesWhere Costimate reads, suggests and drafts with AI, what it never does (change your records by itself, set a price, decide), when it runs, and what is sent to the AI provider.
- Connect ChatGPTCreate and update opportunities, clients, suppliers, contacts, leads and notes from ChatGPT, as yourself, in the company you choose.
- Connect GrokCreate and update opportunities, clients, suppliers, contacts, leads and notes from Grok, as yourself, in the company you choose.
Trust
- Security and your dataWhere your data is kept, how companies are kept apart, who can see prices and pay, how you sign in, and what AI and connected apps may read.
- Privacy and data processingWhich legal text covers what: the Privacy Policy, the Data Processing Terms, the Terms of Service and the Expert Terms, and where to go with a question or a request.