If you are a General Contractor doing $2M to $10M in revenue, your “file management system” probably looks like this:
When you were smaller, this worked. But now that you are juggling multiple custom builds or commercial renos, the “search and rescue” mission for documents is eating into your profit margin.
Here is why generic tools fail for construction, and how to fix it without buying expensive enterprise software.
Email is the enemy of version control.
The moment you attach a set of plans to an email, you have created a “dead” copy. If the architect updates the drawing an hour later, that email attachment is now a liability. If a subcontractor builds off the old PDF because they didn’t check their inbox for the new email, you are looking at costly rework.
The Rule: never attach the file itself. Always send a link to a central source of truth.
Generic cloud storage is great for photos, but it’s dangerous for construction bids and plans.
1. The Permission Nightmare You want to share the “Project A” folder with your subs. But that folder also contains the client’s budget, your markup calculations, and proposals from other subs. To fix this, you have to create a separate “Public” folder and manually copy-paste files into it. Now you have two versions of every file (see “The Problem with Email” above).
2. The “Conflict Copy” If you and your project manager both try to update the Bid Log Excel sheet at the same time in Dropbox, you end up with “Bid Log (Conflicted Copy).” Now you have to spend an hour merging data manually.
You don’t need complex software to get this right, you just need a system that follows these three rules.
There should only be one place where the live plans exist. When you invite a subcontractor to bid, they should be looking at the same file you are looking at. If you update the plan in your system, it should update for them automatically. No “resending” required.
Your plumber needs to see the Plumbing Plans and the Schedule. They do not need to see the electrical bid or your profit margin. A good file system allows you to tag a file (e.g., “Plumbing”, “Public”, “Internal Only”) so the software handles the permissions for you.
If your file system requires a laptop to access, it’s useless. Subcontractors are on their phones in their trucks. If they have to download a 50MB zip file to view a drawing, they won’t do it. They need to be able to preview the PDF instantly on a mobile browser.
We built Bid Bench because we were tired of the “Dropbox Shuffle.”
We realized that file storage shouldn’t be separate from your budget—it should be part of it.
Stop digging through your inbox for that one PDF. Try Bid Bench today and keep your budgets, bids, and files in one clean place.