You know the feeling. It’s 8:00 PM. You have three quotes from three different electricians for a custom home renovation.
Now, you have to open Excel. You create columns for each sub. You start manually typing in numbers, trying to make the rows line up. You’re trying to compare apples to oranges, but right now, it feels more like comparing apples to hand grenades.
This process is called Bid Leveling, and for decades, Excel was the only way to do it. But for General Contractors doing $1M–$15M in revenue, the spreadsheet method is becoming a liability.
Here is the honest comparison between sticking with Excel and moving to dedicated bid leveling software.
Excel is free (mostly) and flexible. We all use it. But when it comes to leveling bids, Excel has three major fatal flaws that cost GCs money.
Every time you manually type a number from a PDF into a spreadsheet cell, you risk a typo. Dropping a zero or transposing a digit is human nature. In a rush to get a budget to a client, a $5,000 mistake in a cell formula can eat your entire management fee for that line item.
Excel is great for math, but it’s terrible for context. If Sub B writes “Excludes permit fees” in the fine print of their PDF, Excel won’t catch that. You just see the bottom-line number. You pick Sub B because they look $500 cheaper.
Three weeks later, you realize you’re on the hook for $1,200 in permits. You just paid $700 for the privilege of hiring the “cheaper” guy. This is a classic Scope Gap, and spreadsheets are notorious for hiding them.
“Final_Bid_Leveling_v3_UPDATED.xlsx” Does this look familiar? When you receive a revised quote from a sub, updating the spreadsheet is a manual chore. If you forget to update the summary tab, your client presentation is wrong.
Dedicated bidding software isn’t just “Excel on the web.” It is designed specifically to handle the chaos of subcontractor proposals.
Modern tools (using basic AI) can look at your subcontractor’s PDF and pull the numbers out for you. Instead of typing, you are reviewing. This eliminates the “fat finger” data entry errors that plague manual spreadsheets.
Software forces standardization. It creates a clean dashboard where Sub A, B, and C are side-by-side. More importantly, good software allows you to attach the original PDF proposal directly to the line item. You don’t have to dig through your Outlook folders to check the fine print; the source document is one click away from the number.
This is the biggest advantage. Software can visually flag deviations. If the average framing bid is $45,000, and one sub comes in at $22,000, Excel just calculates the average. Software highlights the red flag. It prompts you to ask, “What did this guy miss?” before you sign the contract.
Stick with Excel if:
Switch to Software if:
The goal of bid leveling isn’t just to find the cheapest number. It’s to ensure complete scope coverage so your profit margin stays safe. Excel was a great tool for the last 20 years, but it relies entirely on you being perfect at data entry.
Your time is better spent building relationships and managing projects, not wrestling with broken formulas.
Ready to stop copy-pasting from PDFs? [Try our simple bid leveling tool] and see how fast you can turn subcontractor proposals into a client-ready budget.