Frequently asked
Mostly about where the numbers come from, and what happens when Archer disagrees with you.
Hours first, price last. Archer reads the solicitation for what drives labor — square footage by area type, fixture counts, service frequencies, cleaning windows, day porter requirements — then prices those hours using ISSA-style task times: minutes per fixture, square feet per hour by method, receptacles per shift. Wages resolve from the wage determination, the collective bargaining agreement, or local market data, in that order. On top sits the full cost stack: payroll burden, supplies, equipment, overhead, mobilization, and margin.
The price is the output of that stack, not an input to it. That is the difference between an estimate and a number you picked and then justified.
Every task carries a range a trained crew actually sustains — not a single rate. If the plan requires a crew to work faster than the top of that band, Archer flags the bid as undeliverable rather than quietly returning a lower price. That is the failure mode this was built to prevent: a won contract that loses money in month three because nobody could clean at the rate it was priced at.
Yes, and it will tell you when you cannot get there. Name a target and the target solver runs the model backwards across every lever — margin, production rate, wage, staffing, supplies, overhead — and reports what each would have to become, what stops it, and how much room is left.
Two rules keep that honest. A lever bounded by a shipped default is not treated as credible evidence that a target is reachable. And a wage floor or a production ceiling is a wall, not a suggestion — Archer will say a number is not achievable rather than pretending the constraint is not there.
It does not know, and it does not pretend to. Archer fits a price distribution to comparable awards you supply — bid tabulations, public records, your own history — and reports a probability, with the dispersion it measured and whether that dispersion came from your data or from a default. Feed it nothing and it says so instead of inventing a field.
From that it finds the price that maximizes expected profit, and what a 50, 65 or 80 percent chance of winning would cost you. When no price above your margin floor has a real chance, it returns a no-bid rather than recommending a cut that changes nothing.
No, and you should not. Archer ships with labeled placeholder rates so it runs out of the box, and every bid priced with them carries a warning saying so. Upload one of your own bid workbooks and Archer maps its production rates, burden, overhead and margin rules into the engine, showing you exactly which cells it read before you accept them. The warning disappears when your model takes over.
That is most of what it is for. Service Contract Act wage determinations, Davis-Bacon, state prevailing wage, and living wage ordinances are treated as floors the solver will not cross. Where a collective bargaining agreement sets a wage for each contract year, Archer prices each year at that wage rather than applying a flat escalator on top of it, which is a common way to overstate a multi-year bid.
It writes the technical volume from the priced model, so the hours in the narrative are the hours in the workbook — staffing plan, transition plan, quality control plan, scope of work, wage compliance. Anything it cannot know about your company is marked as a gap to fill rather than invented. Archer will not write a sentence about your safety record or your references that you did not give it.
Both, and deliberately. The same engine prices a two-building office park and a multi-site pharmaceutical campus; what changes is how much of it you use. A small operator gets a defensible price the first time instead of after three revisions. A national contractor gets CBA wage steps priced year by year, mobilization costed for the crew actually being hired, and portfolios rolled up site by site.
Look at the hours, not the price. Archer shows its work at every level — task, area, site, cost line — so a disagreement can be traced to a specific production rate or frequency rather than argued about in the abstract. Often the spec says something different from what everyone assumed. Sometimes Archer is wrong, and the fix is to load your own rates. Either way the disagreement is the useful part.
Put a live solicitation through Archer and compare it against how you priced it.