You are going to need to tell ResponsiBid what cities you service. By default ResponsiBid has the city City, State (example) but you will need to load in your own.

Ninja Tip: Make sure that if you decide to enter in city and states (or provinces) in manually that you always use [City Name][comma][space][State or Province Name]… this way if you decide to connect to another software using a connection, ResponsiBid will be able to tell what goes in their city spot and what goes in the State/Province spot.

Loading in your cities

ResponsiBid has a really neat tool that will allow you to load in the cities you service really fast. Go to Settings > Form Builder and open the Service Areas accordion:

When you open it up you can choose a radius (as a crow flies) that you’d like ResponsiBid to search for cities. Make sure that the zip code you enter in is central to your service area because it will make your life a lot easier if you have a lot of cities that you service.

Once you’ve entered in the 2 pieces of information needed, click the blue search button. ResponsiBid will then bring up all of the cities in that radius and you can either manually click on all the ones you want to bring into your service areas– or you can just click the white “Select All” button and once you have all the cities selected that you want, you can then click the green “Add Selected” button. It’s much easier to add cities all at once than starting with a small radius, adding those cities, and then growing it, because you could end up with duplicates that way. But once you have added the cities to your list, ResponsiBid will now make those options available to those who get a bid.

Ninja tip: Some people want to use service areas in different way for their purposes… like “Upper Chicago” or “West Los Angeles” which ResponsiBid is totally fine with, just make sure that everything works with any connections you may have. You can even add “Other Area” as a city. ResponsiBid won’t care, but make sure it works like you want it to.

Setting Minimums and Trip Charges

ResponsiBid will allow you to choose minimum prices and trip charges once you have added them to your list:

You will also see that you have the option of setting some minimum pricing for your stand-alone-service bids. This means that each house size can be assigned a price floor for any package level (you can turn it off for individual customers as necessary) but this will keep ultra-low bids from going out, and it also helps you set your ultimate job minimums so that ResponsiBid never underbids.

Ninja tip: If there is a mistake people make here it is that they often get carried away setting minimums that are too high and get frustrated when ResponsiBid keeps giving back prices that are too high. Remember that these are minimums, so get it as low as you are comfortable with, but no lower.

If you have a really long list of cities, keep in mind that the search-and-add feature explained above will add the closest cities toward the center of the radius first and then get further and further away… so if you are adding job minimums and/or trip charges it would make the most sense to see your prices getting hire as you go down the list (but not necessarily always– you know your area best). Remember that the trip charge always adds on to a job minimum so in the case of a premium West Hollywood job, the minimum and trip charge would come together for $324 as the LOWEST premium job that would ever show.

How the Minimums for Area & House Sizes Work Together

When a job of a certain house size has minimum set and the city it is in also has set minimums, ResponsiBid will take the final calculation of the bid and compare that to the minimum of the house size as well as the city minimum. the higher of the 2 minimums will be used. Example: If the basic price is calculated at $50, but the house size minimum for the basic package is $125, and the service area minimum for the basic package is $145, then ResponsiBid will not show the calculated price and choose the higher minimum for the city… $145.

Ninja tip: If you have a lot of cities that you service and don’t want to have to enter in city minimums as much don’t bother putting anything in for the cities whose minimums would be covered by the house size minimums since they’d be overridden or the same anyway. Also, if you have a lot of entries to put in, be sure to maximize your copy & paste options!