If you are a General Contractor doing between $2M and $10M in revenue, your “Bid Day” usually looks something like this:
You have three different Excel spreadsheets open. You have 45 unread emails from subcontractors, half of which are just asking “Did you get my quote?”. You have a stack of PDF proposals saved to your desktop, but you aren’t sure if the electrician sent the revised number or the original one.
It’s chaos. And in construction, chaos costs money.
For years, the industry standard for managing bids was a combination of Excel, Outlook, and a whiteboard. But as projects get more complex and timelines get tighter, the “manual method” is becoming a liability.
This is why more custom home builders and mid-sized GCs are moving to dedicated software to manage construction bids. Here is why the switch is happening, and what you should look for if you are ready to leave the spreadsheets behind.
Most GCs start with Excel. It makes sense—it’s free, flexible, and you already know how to use it. But Excel wasn’t built for project management; it was built for math.
When you manage bids in Excel, you run into three specific “revenue leaks”:
You enter a plumber’s bid of $18,500 into your spreadsheet. Two days later, they email a revised quote of $19,200 because copper prices went up. If you forget to update that one cell in your spreadsheet, you just ate $700 of profit.
Tracking who has bid and who hasn’t is a full-time job. You spend hours texting subs, asking if they saw the invite. Without software to track the status of your Invitation to Bid (ITB), you risk reaching the deadline with zero coverage in critical trades.
Subcontractors send proposals in every format imaginable: distinct PDFs, photos of a napkin, or just a number typed in the body of an email. Trying to centralize these into one “source of truth” requires constant administrative work that you (or your PM) simply don’t have time for.
Modern bid management software acts as a bridge between your budget and your subcontractors. It replaces the isolated spreadsheet with a collaborative platform.
Here are the core functions that save you time:
Instead of sending 50 individual emails, the software allows you to send bid invites to all your subcontractors for a specific line item at once. More importantly, it tracks them. You can see who opened the email, who accepted the invite, and who declined. You know exactly which trades need a follow-up phone call.
When you are bidding a custom home, you have dozens of documents—architectural plans, structural engineering, soil reports, and specs. Software allows you to host these in the cloud. When you invite a sub, they get a link to view the plans automatically. You don’t need to attach massive files to emails or worry about bouncing inboxes.
This is the game-changer. As bids come in, they are logged directly into the project. Good software allows you to “level” these bids—comparing them side-by-side to ensure everyone is bidding on the same scope of work.
For a long time, GCs had two choices: stay in Excel, or pay thousands of dollars a year for enterprise tools like Procore or BuilderTrend.
While those platforms are powerful, they are often overkill for a company with 3–10 employees. You don’t need complex RFI workflows or massive ERP integrations; you just need to get a budget built and bids collected.
The new wave of micro-SaaS construction tools focuses on simplicity. They offer:
One of the newest innovations in bid management software is the use of AI.
Historically, even with software, you still had to manually type the subcontractor’s price into the system. But new tools can now scan the PDF proposal you received from your electrician, recognize the total cost, and automatically add it to your budget line item.
This eliminates the “fat finger” error of typing a $15,000 bid as $1,500, and it drastically speeds up the data entry process.
If you are building one house a year, Excel is fine. But if you are juggling multiple projects, custom renovations, or managing $2M+ in annual revenue, the mental load of tracking bids manually is slowing you down.
Software to manage construction bids isn’t just about being “high tech.” It’s about organized professionalism. It ensures that when you present a number to a client, you have the backing to prove it, and the organization to execute it.