What should a line item show the customer?
Store, date, source — or don't ship the number.
A priced line that cannot say where the figure came from and how old it is will not survive the first customer who asks, and the moment you invent a source to fill the gap the problem stops being yours and becomes theirs.
The four things on a defensible line
Quantity and unit, so they can check it against the plan. Unit price. Where the price basis came from. The date that basis is good as of. A line missing the last two is a number the customer has to take on faith.
Labor belongs on the same footing: the role, the hours, and the loaded rate you actually pay, not a composite from a book.
Say what the number is, exactly
There is a real difference between a written quote from your supplier for this job, and a reference figure that tells you roughly what this item runs in this market. Both are useful. Only one is a commitment from a vendor, and a proposal that blurs them is setting up an argument later.
Portravo prints the source, the location and an as-of date on every priced material line and carries the same columns into the Excel export. Read those as the Portravo benchmark for the Sacramento metro as of that date. They are a basis for your bid, not a live quote held open for you, so get supplier confirmation on the big lines before you commit.
What to leave off
Your markup does not need its own line on the customer copy. Neither does your internal contingency reasoning. The customer-facing PDF should be clean; the Excel export is where you keep the full bill of materials with the source and date columns for yourself.
And leave off anything you cannot back up. A fabricated citation on a proposal a homeowner forwards to three other bidders is a worse outcome than having no citation at all.
Line item checklist
Every priced line in a proposal should pass all six.
- 01Quantity and unit the customer can check against a sheet.
- 02Unit price and extended price.
- 03A named basis for the price: a supplier quote, your own invoice, or a dated benchmark.
- 04The date that basis is good as of.
- 05Labor shown by role and loaded hourly rate, from your rate card.
- 06Nothing on the line you could not produce a document for if asked.
No account, no card. Send your last supplier quote as a PDF and it comes back marked against the Portravo Sacramento benchmark within one business day.
Send a supplier quote for a free audit- Does Portravo show the customer where each price came from?
- Yes. Every priced material line carries its source, location and an as-of date, and those columns are in the Excel export as well as the customer PDF. They describe the Portravo benchmark that priced the line, not a supplier quote held open for you.
- Should I show my markup to the customer?
- That is your call and it varies by market, but the itemized cost detail and your margin are separate decisions. Portravo exports a clean customer PDF and a full Excel bill of materials so you can share one without the other.