I have been using power! and absolutely love it.
My advice is download some, find some proposals you did by hand, and run them thru the software. This way you can see which program thinks like you do.
However you need to watch the percentages. They call out different reduction when bidding, and for me there's was unacceptable. The first thing you should do is customize all the forms for your company name, license info and percentage's for markup and such.
I have bid projects from 500 to 100000, and gotten them succesfully. It especialy helps on the 15000 to 100000 dollar range, because some of the bids were against other contractors and I won and made money.
It also helps to keep you consistent with customers, once you determine a markup vakue for customer X, just open up their last proposal, save it as the new project and rework all the numbers for the proposal.
And as for pricing, power!'s database is priced high for the most part, once the proposal is complete, I generate a pricing request sheet and fax to my supplier, compare notes and fix in the main database if needed. Works great.
