If you are a General Contractor doing between $1M and $15M in revenue, your “bid day” probably looks something like this:
You have three different Excel spreadsheets open. You are scrolling through your email inbox, searching for a PDF quote from your plumber that you swear came in yesterday. Meanwhile, your phone is buzzing with a text from an electrician asking, “Did you get my number?”
This is the “Old Way” of managing subcontractor proposals. It relies on memory, manual data entry, and a whole lot of Ctrl+F in Outlook.
The problem isn’t that you aren’t organized—it’s that you are outgrowing your tools. Excel is great for numbers, but it’s terrible for managing the process of receiving, sorting, and comparing dozens of PDF proposals.
Here is why moving your subcontractor proposal management online is the single biggest productivity unlock for mid-sized GCs.
Most GCs start with a simple system: create a folder on the desktop for the project, drag PDF quotes into it, and type the numbers into Excel.
But as you scale from $1M to $5M or $10M, this system starts to break down.
Managing proposals online doesn’t mean you need Enterprise software like Procore that costs $20k a year and requires a week of training.
For a modern custom builder or remodeler, “online management” just means having a Single Source of Truth.
Instead of bids landing in your email, text messages, and voicemail, an online system gives you a dedicated place for everything. When you invite subs to bid, their responses flow directly into the project bucket. You can see at a glance who has viewed the plans, who has accepted the invite, and who has submitted a number.
This is where the magic happens. In the old way, you had to flip between two PDF documents to see if the plumber included fixtures or just rough-in.
With online proposal management, you can view proposals side-by-side. You can see immediately that Sub A is $5,000 cheaper than Sub B, but Sub A excluded the permit fees. You catch the mistake before you sign the contract, protecting your margin.
Construction doesn’t happen in the office. If you are standing on the job site and a sub asks, “What was the scope we agreed on?”, you shouldn’t have to drive back to the office to check a file on your desktop server.
Cloud-based management means you can pull up the accepted proposal on your phone, right there in the field, and resolve the dispute in seconds.
The biggest fear GCs have about new software is the learning curve. You don’t have time to stop building just to learn a new system.
That is why we built Bid Bench.
We designed it specifically for the “Excel Refugee”—the contractor who is ready to graduate from spreadsheets but hates the complexity of the big enterprise tools.
You started your business to build great homes, not to be a data entry clerk copying numbers from PDFs into cells C4 through C90.
By moving your subcontractor proposals online, you reclaim your time. You stop the “email chase.” And most importantly, you gain the confidence that your numbers are accurate, your scope is covered, and your profit is protected.