Forward invitations from your plan room

The problem plan rooms do not solve

A plan room surfaces bid opportunities and gives you the documents. That is its job. BidIntell does not connect to the plan room. You forward the invitation it already sent you.

What they do not tell you is whether the opportunity is worth pursuing. That decision is still on you — and it is the one that costs the most estimating time.

A specialty subcontractor receives bid documents from the plan rooms they subscribe to. Every invitation is a decision to pursue or to pass. Most firms make that call by gut feel, a quick scan of the cover sheet, and whatever the estimator happens to know about that client from experience.

The time spent evaluating bids you were never going to win is time not spent on the ones you could. BidIntell is the filter that goes in between.

Two ways to get bid documents into BidIntell

BidIntell is designed to fit into the workflow you already have, not add a new one on top of it.

Both methods produce the same result: a BidIndex, with the project details extracted and saved to your dashboard. A forwarded invite is read within a day. Most estimators end up using both depending on how a particular GC sends their packages. How scoring works explains the three labels: Open & assign, Worth a look, and Likely skip.

The workflow from plan room to scored bid

1. Plan Room Bid documents arrive from your plan room

   The invitation arrives from your plan room, or straight from the GC. You get an email with attached documents, or a link to download from the plan room.

2. BidIntell Forward the email or upload the documents

   If the bid came by email: forward it to your BidIntell alias address. If it came through a portal: download the package and upload it to BidIntell. Either way, BidIntell handles the extraction from there.

3. BidIntell Read the BidIndex

   BidIntell reads the project details and returns a whole-number score from 0 to 100 across Project Fit, Scope Fit, and Client Fit. The label is Open & assign, Worth a look, or Likely skip. The score is specific to your company — the same bid documents score differently for different contractors because the fit is different. A forwarded invite is read within a day.

4. Decide whether to pursue it

   If the score supports it, pull the full plans and start your estimate. If it does not, you have documented reasons to pass without spending days finding out the hard way.

5. BidIntell Log the outcome when the bid closes

   Won, lost, ghosted by the GC, or you declined. Each logged outcome improves the accuracy of future scores for your company with that GC.

Forward the invitation you already have

There is no plan-room connection to turn on. Forward the invitation email, or upload the documents you downloaded from the room.

What BidIntell looks at in the bid documents

Whether you forward an email or upload a file, BidIntell scores three weighted buckets that determine whether the opportunity is worth pursuing for your specific company. Contract language is flagged as an alert, not a fourth slider.

Project Fit. Is this the kind of job you want? Distance from your office, service territory, and project type factor into whether the work is realistic to pursue profitably.

Scope Fit. Does the scope of work align with what your company actually does? BidIntell uses CSI MasterFormat section codes and your trade keywords to assess whether the work is in your wheelhouse. A flooring sub should score differently on a resilient flooring package than on a painting package, even if both arrive from the same plan room on the same day.

Client Fit. How have past bids with this GC gone? If you have logged outcomes from previous projects with this general contractor, that history factors into the score. Over time, BidIntell builds a record of which GCs in your market actually award work to firms like yours.

Contract risk alerts. Bid documents often include contract terms or reference the project general conditions. BidIntell scans for risk language — pay-if-paid provisions, broad indemnification, no-damage-for-delay clauses, liquidated damages, and others. These are not a weighted scoring bucket. They are information worth having before you commit to the estimate.

The plan room found the opportunity. BidIntell tells you whether it is worth the estimating hours before you open a single plan sheet.

What this actually saves

The decision to pursue a bid — not the estimate itself, just the decision — takes experienced estimator time when done carefully, before a single quantity gets taken off.

BidIntell does not remove the judgment call. The estimator still decides. The score puts Project Fit, Scope Fit, Client Fit, and contract alerts in one place before anyone opens a plan sheet.

The forwarding address removes one more step from the workflow. Instead of logging into BidIntell to upload a document, the analysis starts the moment you forward the email. By the time you open BidIntell, the score is already there.

Firms that log outcomes consistently get a compounding benefit over time: the score gets more accurate. The more bid results you track — won, lost, ghosted, declined — the more precisely BidIntell weights the factors that actually predict success for your company with your specific GC relationships in your territory.