It is 3:00 PM on a Thursday. You have a bid due to a client on Monday morning. You sent out emails to three plumbers, four electricians, and your two favorite framers last week.
Do you know—for a fact—who is going to send you a number?
For most General Contractors in the $1M–$15M revenue range, the answer is “let me check my email.” You spend the next hour digging through your inbox, searching for “RE: Bid Invite,” checking your spam folder, and cross-referencing a manual Excel spreadsheet that hasn’t been updated since Tuesday.
This is the “ITB Black Hole.” You send invites out, and you have no idea what is happening until a PDF lands in your inbox (or doesn’t).
There is a cleaner, faster way to handle Invitations to Bid (ITB) that doesn’t require enterprise-level software like Procore.
When you were doing $500k a year, you could remember which electrician said he was too busy. But as you scale to $2.5m, $5m, or $7m, the volume of communication outpaces your memory.
Relying on standard email for bid tracking creates three expensive problems:
The fix isn’t to change who you hire, but to change how you invite them. You need to move the “Yes/No/Maybe” status out of your head and onto a dashboard.
Modern construction micro-SaaS tools (like ours) allow you to streamline this into a visual process. Here is what it looks like to track ITB responses online:
Instead of copy-pasting standard text into Gmail ten times, you create the bid package once in the software. You add your line items (e.g., “03-000 Concrete”) and select your subs from your directory. One click sends the invites.
This is the game changer. When you send an ITB through a dedicated platform, you can see when a subcontractor opens the invite.
If you see a sub has opened the invite three times but hasn’t submitted a bid, they are interested but likely busy. That is who you call. If a sub hasn’t opened the email at all after three days, the email is likely buried. That is who you text.
Good bidding software gives your subcontractors a simple button in the email: “I’m Bidding” or “Pass.”
When they click that, your dashboard updates automatically. You don’t need to enter data. You can log in and instantly see a “Green Light” next to the subs who are engaged and a “Red Light” next to those who declined.
The goal of tracking ITB responses isn’t just to be organized; it’s to build a budget faster.
Once those bids start coming in, the next hurdle is getting the data out of their PDF proposal and into your budget. This is where our tool helps you further. Once you’ve tracked that the bid has arrived, our AI features help you parse that PDF proposal, extract the total cost and scope, and drop it directly into your budget line item.
You cannot control whether a subcontractor is too busy to bid. But you can control how you manage the process.
Stop using your inbox as a to-do list. By moving your ITB tracking to a dedicated tool, you ensure that on bid day, you aren’t hoping for numbers—you’re just reviewing them.