Your proposal WBS represents how your company wants to breakdown the proposal delivery, resources and cost, while the priced line items represent how the customer wants to see their costs broken down. Often your competitors will each have different WBS cost breakdowns so your prospect or customer requires all bidders to follow their priced line item or CLIN structure in order to compare "apples with apples".

You need to allocate the costs from your WBS element structure to the customer's priced line items so that you:

• Understand what each priced line item (customer required break-down) actually costs
• Calculate the profit (or loss) you are going to make on each priced line item. This is revenue minus allocated WBS cost
• To make sure that all your costs have been allocated somewhere in the bid.

You can either allocate one or more WBS elements to your priced line items, or you can allocate one or more priced line items to your WBS elements. It is a "many to many" relationship.

To allocate your WBS element's costs to one or more priced line items, open the WBS tab and click on the pencil icon to open the WBS details popup:

1. Click on the ITEMS tab of the WBS details popup to see what priced line items your WBS costs are being allocated to
2. The table shows all proposal line items your WBS costs are allocated to. Click the + to add a new line item and select a priced line item from the list
3. When you first add a single line item to your WBS it by default allocates 100% of the WBS' cost to that line item. Edit the % of your WBS cost you want to assign to each proposal line item
   • The various % across all selected proposal line items for this WBS must add up to 100%
4. The allocated cost automatically appears; it is simply the sum of your WBS estimated costs multiplied by the %
   • Only costs which were previously estimated will be displayed here, however future estimated costs will automatically get allocated based on the same % splits so do not worry if the total costs look too low when you are still developing your estimates.

Instead of allocating your WBS to one or more proposal priced line items from the WBS detailed popup, you can instead allocate your line items to one or more WBS elements from the proposal LINE ITEMS tab. This is more advanced.

This time, click on the pencil from the LINE ITEMS tab and click on the WBS tab in the line item details popup:

1. The WBS tab will show you all WBS elements which have costs flowing to this proposal line item
2. For each WBS enter the % of that WBS' cost going to this specific priced line item
3. The costs do not necessarily add up to 100%. Each WBS is allocated 100% to one or multiple line items but one priced line item can be assigned cost from multiple WBS elements, or from a portion of a single WBS
   • For example, your prospect wants to split out warranty costs but your estimate for after-delivery support is instead broken down into one WBS per country or site doing support work, a mix of warranty and non-warranty work. You decide, perhaps arbitrarily, that 10% of your support cost is going towards warranty and 90% is paid-support. To achieve this, assign every support country WBS to the warranty priced line item with 10% allocation, and every support country WBS is also assigned to the paid-support line item item with 90% cost allocation
4. Confirm or close the popup to save your changes. Cancel out of the application to avoid saving your edits.