Bid pipeline and backlog in one place

What this dashboard answers

How much work is booked and not yet delivered, which in this dataset is $41.7M of backlog against $4.94M of active orders. What proportion of bids actually convert, here an 11.8% win rate at a 25.8% average margin across 38 active projects.

Then it breaks that down by the person responsible. Each salesperson's quotes are split across lost, priced and won, so a low win rate can be traced to whether someone is losing bids or simply never pricing them. The largest open quotes are listed alongside, with the customer, the salesperson, the weighted amount and the bid margin on each one. Gross profit percent is shown separately for bids already accepted and bids still open, which is the comparison that tells you whether someone is buying work to hit a number.

The backlog page answers a different question

Backlog is broken out by month and by salesperson on the first page, then the second page drops to job level: customer, job, order date, ship date, total, and expected cash date. There it is charted by ship week rather than by month, because a shop floor is scheduled in weeks.

The expected cash date column is the one people tend to stop on. It connects the sales pipeline directly to cash planning, so booked work becomes a forecast of when money actually arrives rather than a number that feels reassuring in a meeting.

Who this shape of reporting fits

Businesses that bid for work. Contractors, fabricators, custom manufacturers, industrial services. Anywhere the unit of sale is a job with a quote, a margin, a ship date, and a customer waiting on it.

It is a genuinely different problem from selling a catalogue of products, which is why a generic sales dashboard usually disappoints this kind of company. Backlog and win rate matter more than units moved.

Where the data comes from

The estimating or quoting system for bid data, and the ERP for orders, jobs, ship dates, and costs. For most project businesses the job costing module of the ERP is the source of truth, and margin has to be calculated from it rather than assumed.

Joining the two is the actual work. Quote data alone tells you what was hoped for. Job data tells you what was delivered and at what margin. Win rate is only trustworthy when it is measured against the second one.

What changes once you have it

Win rate by salesperson stops being anecdote and becomes a number somebody owns. Bids that were priced and then never chased become visible instead of quietly expiring.

And the conversation about capacity changes, because backlog by ship week shows you the weeks that are already full and the weeks that are not, before the quote goes out rather than after.

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