A doors and hardware bid rarely goes wrong on the door count. Hollow metal frames, wood doors and hardware sets all sit on a schedule, and counting openings is the easy part of the job. Where this trade loses money is at the edges the schedule doesn't settle by itself. Three questions cover most of it.
What's cleanly yours
- Hollow metal frames and doors, supply: gauges, cores, fire and life-safety labels, profiles, sidelites and borrowed lites per the door schedule. The most consistently documented part of the bid.
- Wood doors, supply: cores, faces, labels, prefit or premachine per the schedule. Prefit/premachine shift field labour into the shop, at a different cost structure than a field-fit door.
- Finish hardware, supply: the sets, complete. Extract set counts, which items are electrified, closer/operator splits between manual and automatic, and any clause locking hardware to a single named series, which removes your ability to substitute for cost or lead time.
- Keying: meetings, master-key structure, key quantities, construction cores, the final cylinder swap at turnover. Coordination-heavy, and easy to under-price against a simple per-cylinder rate.
Does supply come with install?
Whether this scope is supply-only or supply-and-install is genuinely inconsistent tender to tender, and the two halves don't even move together: frames are commonly installed by drywall or masonry rather than this trade, while hardware installation can land almost anywhere. Extract the assignment for frames and for hardware separately; treating it as one decision is exactly how half the labour ends up unpriced by everyone.
The same question decides two boundary items. Access panels are frequently written as "supplied under this section, installed by the trade requiring them" — clean until you notice it depends on correctly identifying every trade that requires one. Cross-check the split against the mechanical and electrical schedules that call for the panels; one required by a duct detector three sections away rarely gets flagged back to the door schedule automatically. And aluminum entrances (storefront, curtain-wall) belong to glazing, not you, though hardware supply for those doors is sometimes carved back to this trade even when the door isn't. Overhead, coiling and specialty doors are their own trade too, operators included; flag it when a tender lumps one into the same schedule as hollow metal and wood, since pricing and lead-time models don't transfer.
Who terminates the electrified hardware?
Electric strikes, magnetic locks, automatic flush bolts and their power supplies need extracting together with the wiring split, because the split is where the argument happens: power and rough-in almost always belong to electrical, but termination, the final connection at the device, gets contested on nearly every job that has electrified hardware at all. Confirm termination per opening type rather than assuming one answer covers every electrified device on the schedule.
Security electronics sit next to this and get confused with it: card readers, door contacts and access controllers are Division 28 work, not yours. What is yours is the door and frame prep those devices require. Extract it specifically, since a door ordered without the correct prep is a costly field retrofit later.
Does the hardware schedule cover every opening?
Openings with no assigned set, sets referencing a discontinued product series, outright conflicts between the schedule and the written spec: all common, and every gap found now is a change order avoided rather than one discovered at rough-in. Two things constrain what "covered" even means. The fire and smoke label assigned to each opening also constrains what glazing is allowed in the door, worth checking against actual vision-lite sizes on the elevations rather than assumed compliant. And specialty openings (STC-rated, lead-lined, bullet-resistant) each come from a different supplier with its own lead time, so a single one buried in an otherwise standard schedule can set the critical path for the whole door package. On a job with a long gap between delivery and frame-setting, extract delivery, storage and handling too: on-site storage duties and who's on the hook for damage while doors and frames wait.
Who you're sharing the opening with
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Drywall & masonry | Who sets hollow metal frames in stud or masonry walls, and the grouting requirement for frames in masonry openings. |
| Electrical & security | Power transfer hinges, rough-in locations and termination responsibility, confirmed per opening rather than once for the whole schedule. |
| Painting | Factory-finished versus field-finished hollow metal per the schedule, and the sequence for touch-up after frame installation. |
| General contractor | Keying authority, temporary construction cores during the build, and the turnover process to permanent keying. |
Read the hardware schedule against the door schedule opening by opening, not as two documents assumed to agree; that's where gaps and discontinued-series conflicts surface. Then answer the three questions above explicitly rather than defaulting to whatever split applied on the last job. The door schedule tells you what to supply; the answers decide whether that supply arrives ready to install or arrives to a fight about who installs it.