It’s 8:00 PM on a Tuesday. You have a bid due for a custom home remodel next week. You have the plans, you have the scope, but you are missing one critical piece: numbers from your subs.
So, you open Gmail.
You find the electrician’s email. You attach the PDF plans. You write a subject line: “New Project - 123 Main St - Please Bid.” You hit send. Then you do it again for the plumber. Then the framer. Then the HVAC guy.
By the time you are done, you have sent 25 individual emails, or worse—you BCC’d everyone on one email (which looks unprofessional and usually lands in spam).
Two days later, your inbox is a mess. You don’t know who opened the email, who is bidding, or who is ignoring you.
If you are a General Contractor doing $1M–$15M in revenue, you are likely too big for this manual “Gmail shuffle,” but you might feel too small for expensive enterprise software like Procore.
There is a better way to email bid invites. It doesn’t require complex portals, and it keeps your inbox clean.
Using standard email (Gmail, Outlook) to manage Invitation to Bids (ITBs) creates three specific problems that cost you money:
The goal isn’t to replace email; it’s to automate it.
You need a system that acts as a bridge between your project files and your subcontractors. Here is how a lightweight bid management tool changes the workflow:
Instead of attaching heavy PDFs to every email, you upload your plans and specs to a cloud-based link once.
When you send the invite, the sub gets a link to view the files. If you update the plans, you simply update the file in the cloud. The link stays the same. The sub always sees the current set. No more “Oops, I bid off the wrong drawing” excuses.
You select all your plumbers at once. You click “Send Invite.”
The system sends a personalized email to each one. It looks like it came from you, not a robot. To the sub, it looks like a personal request. To you, it was one click instead of twenty.
This is the game-changer. Instead of digging through your Sent folder, you look at a dashboard that tells you the status of every sub for every line item:
Now, when you make your follow-up calls, you are only calling the people who haven’t opened the email yet. You save hours of phone time.
Be careful when looking for software to handle this. Many platforms (like BuilderTrend or Oracle) require your subcontractors to create an account, set a password, and log in just to see a drawing.
Subcontractors hate this. If you make it hard to bid, they won’t bid.
The best tools for mid-sized GCs allow “frictionless” bidding. The sub clicks a link in their email, sees the PDF, and can upload their proposal. No passwords, no logins, no app downloads.
Your value as a GC is in building the project and managing the client, not in being a glorious email forwarder.
If you are still copy-pasting bid invites, you are capping your own growth. Switching to a simple, automated email invitation system is one of the fastest ways to professionalize your pre-construction process and get accurate numbers faster.