Took me 6 months to realize my estimating spreadsheet was double counting labor

I've been using the same cost tracking spreadsheet for years, the one I built when I first started doing residential bids. Last month I was walking through a job with a GC and he pointed at my line item for framing labor and said "you got the crew rate in here twice, right?" I stared at it for a minute and yeah, there it was. My hourly rate column and my per-square-foot formula were both pulling from the same cell. Every bid I did since January was padded by maybe 15 percent. I won less work than I should have and I had no idea. Has anyone else found a dumb hidden error like that in their own templates after months of use? How do you catch stuff like this before it costs you jobs?

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jackson.sarah29d ago

So did you go back and recheck every single formula in that sheet after the GC caught it, or just patch that one cell? Because the scary part is how many other errors can hide in plain sight when you trust a template you built yourself. A quick audit of all your functions might hurt more than that 15 percent hit.