Arcvue
Pricing in Arcvue—one task, start to finish
How to price a contract, from an empty proposal to a submitted one.
Select a vehicle, add labor positions, understand the cost build-up, benchmark against the market, target a margin, and export for submission. Ten steps in Arcvue, one proposal, and the three concepts that decide whether the number you send is defensible.
Four things have to exist before a proposal can be priced.
- A contract vehicle, imported. GSA schedule, OASIS+, a MATOC. This happens on the Vehicles tab and nothing downstream works without it.
- Your indirect rates. Fringe, overhead, and G&A, from your DCAA-submitted provisional rates or your own rate structure.
- The labor categories you need, and approximate salaries for them.
- The contract type. T&M, FFP, CPFF, and the rest price differently, and the workspace branches on it.
The pricing work does not happen on the tabs.
Arcvue Pricing opens on six tabs, and they are administration. Opening a proposal from the Proposals tab launches a full-screen workspace, and that is where a price is built.
| Tab | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Proposals | Create and manage proposals. The starting point, and where the workspace opens from. |
| Vehicles | Vehicles, labor categories, rate pools, and imported schedules. |
| Bid History | Historical win/loss analytics and price-to-win. |
| Audit | The change record behind each proposal. |
| Change Log | Rate and schedule changes over time. |
| Settings | Module defaults. |
Screen Arcvue Pricing, as it ships.
| Stage | What you do there |
|---|---|
| 1 · Build | Positions, subcontractors, and other direct costs—the cost base. |
| 2 · Price | Margin analysis, ceiling compare, what-if, absorption, market rates, period summary. |
| 3 · Validate | Run the market benchmark and see how many positions price competitively. |
| 4 · Compare | Competitive positioning and breakeven against named competitors. |
| 5 · Submit | Audit trail, approval, and submission. |
Screen the Arcvue pricing workspace. Each stage carries its own summary as you go.
Five rate fields decide the cost build-up, and each can be overridden per proposal.
A new proposal takes a name, a vehicle, and a contract type. Then it takes the rates, and those are the numbers that determine what the work actually costs you.
| Rate | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Fringe, non-SCA | Benefits, PTO, and payroll taxes for salaried employees. |
| Fringe, SCA | Benefits and health & welfare for Service Contract Act employees. Typically higher. |
| Overhead | Facilities, IT, and management, applied on top of labor plus fringe. |
| G&A | General and administrative, applied on top of labor plus fringe plus overhead. |
| H&W hourly | The health & welfare hourly rate for SCA workers. |
Screen proposal setup. Order matters. The three rates cascade—each applies to a different base, and the sequence is what makes the loaded cost what it is.
Salary escalation defaults to 1.50 percent a year and price escalation to 2.00 percent, applied across option years. If those two differ, your margin moves every year of the contract whether you touch it or not.
Positions, then option years, then the benchmark.
- Add positions. Each carries a labor category, a salary, and a level of effort. The cost build-up runs from there.
- Review the position views. The same positions read differently by cost, by rate, and by period—the views exist because one of them will show a problem the others hide.
- Set option years. Escalation applies here, and this is where a thin margin in the base year becomes a negative one in year four.
- Run the market benchmark. Validate reports how many of your positions price competitively, against real market rates rather than an assumption.
- Analyze the economics. Margin, ceiling compare, absorption, and what-if, before anything is committed.
- Check status and submit. The audit trail and approval, then export for submission.
Three things that are easy to say and easy to get backward.
Wrap rate
Total loaded cost divided by direct labor cost. A wrap of 2.50 means an employee at 50.00 an hour costs 125.00 an hour fully loaded. In GovCon wraps typically run from 2.00 on a lean overhead to 3.50 on a heavy G&A structure. Your wrap is your cost floor: it decides whether a given ceiling rate can produce a margin at all.
Discount is not margin
Discount is the percentage off the ceiling rate—what the government sees. Margin is the percentage of revenue that is profit—what you see. A ten percent discount does not mean a ten percent margin, and the actual margin depends entirely on your loaded cost relative to that ceiling.
SCA and non-SCA
Service Contract Act positions carry a different fringe rate and an hourly health & welfare obligation. Pricing them on the salaried fringe understates the cost of every hour, and the error compounds across a five-year period of performance.
All three are settled by the rate configuration rather than by whoever is building the bid. Arcvue carries the wrap from your own indirect rates, keeps discount and margin on separate lines of the same screen, and holds SCA and non-SCA fringe as two distinct rates—so pricing a position on the wrong one is a visible choice rather than an invisible default. That is the difference between knowing these three things and having to remember them on every bid.