Best Subcontractor Tracking Spreadsheet: Downtobid's Bid Board

Subcontractors must stay informed throughout the bidding process. Accessing recent and detailed bid invites helps them identify work opportunities, negotiate contracts, and structure their bids to match the requirements. Unfortunately, older bid tracking methods aren’t effective anymore. Using construction Excel templates is time-consuming, laborious, and prone to errors. 

Luckily, technology is evolving, and the construction industry welcomes these changes. We now have software that can handle bid tracking within minutes. You don’t need to manually review each bid or fill out boring Excel spreadsheets. That’s the work of the Downtobid Bid Board. We’ll examine the software to determine why it’s uniquely qualified to help subcontractors identify opportunities and track their bids. We’ll also show you how to use the software to achieve maximum results. But first, let’s define Downtobid's Bid Board. 

Note: If you are a subcontractor or material vendor needing to efficiently track bids, then Downtobid's bid board is just for you. Our software automates the integration of bid invites into a collaborative workspace, reducing manual data entry and boosting productivity through features like vendor management and estimating analytics. Click here to try it now.

What is Downtobid's Bid Board

Downtobid's bid board is a construction bid management software that helps subcontractors and material vendors track their bids in one collaborative dashboard. Our software automates everything, eliminating the manual data entry process. 

Think of our tool as a personal assistant handling all administrative tasks. Are general contractors bombarding you with bid invites from multiple construction management platforms? Reviewing all bid invites manually is unrealistic and time-consuming. There’s also a higher chance you might miss lucrative opportunities. That’s where our system comes in. 

We’ve designed Downtobid's Bid Board to integrate with your inbox and filter out bid invites. You just need to drag and drop them into the software’s folder, where it reviews each invite and creates a simple report. You’ll find data like general contractor information and project details like size, budget, timelines, and location, which you can use to create a final bid. Traditionally, you had to review each document manually to access this information.

We’ll explain shortly how our system works. 

Key Features

Here are a few reasons why we stand out from the rest.

Centralized Bid Management

Bid management is more than sending construction proposals. It involves complex tasks like identifying opportunities, prequalifying them, understanding requirements, structuring proposals, evaluating construction costs, and win/loss analysis. As you can see, handling these tasks manually isn’t realistic or worth the time. It’s a costly process, especially if you decide to hire additional help. 

Our software handles all the tasks with minimal input from you, but you must integrate it with your email inbox first. There's a good reason we are ranked among the top bid management softwares.

The software identifies bid invites from multiple contractors and categorizes them into four boards - Undecided, Declined, Accepted, and Estimating. The dashboard design helps you track your bids effectively and ensure you never miss an opportunity. 

Our software evaluates each bid invite and extracts crucial information, such as budget, size, location, and project timeline. You can use this information from general contractors to select suitable construction projects and craft your proposals.

Forget about accepting and declining bid invites manually. Our system does this for you automatically based on the rules you create. This approach gives you the customization power to help you hand-pick construction projects that fit your experience. 

For instance, you could create rules based on location, budget, company name, project duration, and specific keywords relating to your trade. 

Automated Calendar Integration

Every subcontractor’s top priority is beating bid deadlines. You may craft the best construction project proposal but still miss out on the project due to late submission. With subcontractors interested in hundreds of construction projects in a given period, tracking their deadlines manually is a nightmare. 

Luckily, our system eliminates the guesswork by syncing with your calendar and alerting you once you approach the deadline. We’ve also designed the alert system to activate a few days before the deadline, giving you ample time to fact-check, polish, and complete the proposal on time. 

If you need help getting in touch with subcontractors, read our guide on how to find subs.

Collaborative Tools

We understand the importance of construction teams working together. That’s why we centralized all the bid management tools to speed up the bidding process. Our document management approach ensures everyone can access recent reports, updates, and documents to minimize errors and delays. 

Construction project managers can tag their team to leave reminders or discuss estimating progress. They can also assign specific tasks and monitor progress from the same platform. This approach creates a collaborative environment by keeping everyone informed and minimizing errors. 

We overdeliver by providing reporting analysis. You can now access out-of-the-box graphs and reports for analysis to understand trends. For instance, material vendors can use this information to see your best customers and where their business is failing. They can then take corrective measures to improve and consolidate the market.

We hate complex Excel formulas. Who has time to cram them anyway? Shouldn’t you be using your time handling other important tasks, like creating comprehensive bid documents? With our system, you don’t need to manually enter the information in an Excel file. 

Calendar integration allows the team to sync and monitor bid deadlines. This way, they can prioritize bids with closer deadlines to increase their chances of winning projects. 

Presentation is everything, and we have created a seamless dashboard. The bid management page is divided into four sections - submitted bids, awarded, completed, and lost. We also have a win ratio section to help you review your bidding strategy. 

We don’t just show you the lost bids, we also give you reasons for losing so you can make better decisions in the future. 

You can compare the features of other software like Bid Tracer vs Downtobid here.

Now that we know what Downtobid's Bid Board is, let’s see how it works. 

How to Use Downtobid's Bid Board

We made Downtobid's project bid board straightforward to use. Here are crucial steps to help you master our system. 

Click here to get started.

After logging in, you’ll see instructions on integrating our software with your Outlook inbox. It creates a dedicated folder under the ‘Inbox’ section where you can drag and drop email invites.

Our software scans and scrapes the information from the emails, such as contact details, project size, budget, estimated duration, and location. The information is populated within the dashboard for further analysis. You can also add rules to filter bid invites and narrow down the results. The system converts this information into structured data into construction Excel templates, which you can use to structure your bids. 

You can click the assigned project to see other clients and their due dates. Every project has an associated email you can use to contact the project manager. You can also receive and send emails from the platform without opening the email app. 

Project plans are also downloadable to ensure team members are on the same page. Open the bid invite email, which contains the ‘Plans’ link. The software allows you to download specific files related to your trade. 

Reviewing construction plans to find opportunities is a lengthy process. However, we’ve made it straightforward for subs to find opportunities within the plans by using keywords. The keyword feature allows you to search and locate specific opportunities within the plans. For instance, you could search for ‘plumbing’ and see which plan sections contain this work unit. 

One-click data export into Excel documents eliminates the need for doing this manually. It saves you the time of doing this alone or the cost of hiring additional help. 

Try Downtobid Bid Board

Using spreadsheets to track your bids is an outdated, slow, expensive, and error-prone approach. With subcontractors receiving hundreds of bid invites daily, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of important projects that align with your skills. Luckily, Downtobid Bid Board simplifies everything to help you easily manage and keep track of your bids without data entry and on one platform. 

You don’t have to worry about creating a subcontractor documentation tracker, communication tools, or additional staff to help you review bid invites to find opportunities. We have ready-made construction templates to help collect crucial project information from every bid invite. Our system then arranges the data into meaningful reports to help them understand the requirements. 

Sign up for our software today to start automating bid tracking.