When you first sign into ResponsiBid and begin setting up your account, you will need to make a few decisions on how you want ResponsiBid to call things, or how to ask certain questions.

One thing that is really important for ResponsiBid is to know how you’d like to ask people about their house sizes. In some areas, everyone knows their home’s square footage. In other areas, people have no clue. So for those areas where people know their square footage, we recommend the menu option. It allows for really fine tuning of house sizes, and it’s more specific.

This is how it looks when you select that tab. (NOTE: whichever house size option tab is in front for the latest save will end up being the option your company uses, so be sure that when you hit save the option you like best is saved to the front, or else you will find it quite confusing when you are trying to set pricing or get a bid and the house sizes are different than you remember!)

The menu option

You can add up to 30 house sizes here and by choosing the end of the interval for each size, ResponsiBid will determine  the beginning of the next one.

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.

The Graphic Option

The graphic option is a favorite for people who live in areas that don’t know the square footage of their homes. The reason this works well is that you can click on the name of each house and give it a name and also a description that will be visible when the users hover over the image. Some people will use the number of bedrooms to help in the description and others will supplement with square footage intervals on the off chance that someone might know. Some areas have specific names for different house sizes, so do what suits your area best, but remember, this option only has 5 options maximum. The package minimums work exactly the same as the menu option above, along with the ninja tip too!

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!

The Commercial Squarefootage Area

This area is for your convenience and also offers you plenty of additional rows if you need them, so feel free to get these size intervals tuned in just the way you think will be most useful. Remember that if you save this option to the front, ResponsiBid will still keep the house size option for the company that was last saved to the front. This will not impact that default setting.

How this will interact with pricing options

Some of the pricing options for certain modules are really reliant upon knowing the house size of the customer. If you are using modules that need to know that, be sure you have really dialed in the house sizes and are comfortable with them before moving on to pricing. You will notice once you get there that there will be matrix’s that will title each row with the house size defined here. If you change the house sizes at any point later, it won’t necessarily break anything, but it may change the bids you were expecting because of the close relationship that ResponsiBid has with the pricing area. So if you do decide to change these settings at a later date, make sure to go into your pricing area to see if you still like your matrixes.