In construction procurement, the most dangerous number is the one that is missing. A “Scope Gap” occurs when a task required by the plans is not included in any subcontractor’s quote. If these gaps are not identified during the bidding phase, the General Contractor is typically forced to absorb the cost mid-project.
To protect your margin, you must move beyond looking at “Lump Sum” totals and adopt a clinical bid-leveling process.
A subcontractor may submit a low bid simply because they missed a line item in the specifications. If you only look at the bottom line, that sub appears to be the most competitive. However, once the omission is discovered—usually during the rough-in phase—the resulting change order can easily exceed the cost of the “more expensive” bids you originally rejected.
To identify these gaps, you must align your bids.
If a subcontractor provides a single number for a trade, request an itemized breakdown. You cannot compare “Electrical: $20,000” against “Electrical: $18,000” without knowing what is inside those numbers.
Professional subcontractors are diligent about listing exclusions. Compare these exclusions side-by-side. If one plumber excludes “fixture installation” while another includes it, you must add an allowance to the first sub’s bid to normalize the data.
The human brain is excellent at spotting patterns but poor at searching through dozens of pages of text. By aligning bids in a table, the “empty cells” become immediately obvious. If two subs have a cost for “Temporary Power” and the third does not, you have identified a scope gap.
While missing material line items are easy to spot in a table, the real danger often lies in the “Qualifiers”—the fine print at the bottom of the proposal. These are “soft” exclusions that don’t always appear as a line item but can hide thousands of dollars in potential costs.
Common unpriced risks include:
When you level bids side-by-side, you must create a “Penalty” or “Adjustment” column. If Sub A is $1,000 cheaper but excludes debris removal (which you’ll have to pay someone else $1,200 to do), Sub A is actually the more expensive choice. Normalizing these qualifications is the only way to arrive at the true “Apples-to-Apples” cost.
Manually transcribing PDF line items into an Excel sheet to perform this analysis is a significant administrative burden.
Bid Bench automates this clinical review.
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