BEFORE THE BUILD
Where the work actually sits right now.
The lead lives in an inbox.
A general contractor sends an invitation to bid. It lands in one person’s email, or a folder that person named, or on a whiteboard by their desk. Nobody else knows the job exists until they mention it. When they are out for a week the clock on it runs anyway. In Bid, every job you are chasing is on one list the office can see, with what you know about it attached.
The number lives in a spreadsheet.
Quantities get counted in one place and priced in another. Somebody re-keys the takeoff into a sheet built years ago by a person who has since left. It works because one estimator remembers what every column does. That is a habit with a file name, and every bid you send depends on it. In Bid, your rates and your assemblies live in the system, so the estimate gets built the same way whoever is at the desk.
The proposal gets typed last.
Everything has been decided before the document exists. Then somebody rebuilds it by hand, usually the afternoon it is due. What leaves the building is the third format the same numbers have been in, and nobody goes back to check the first two against it. In Bid, the proposal comes off the estimate that produced it, in your format, under your name. There is no third copy to check.