Bid Manager Software Details

Construction bids are rarely accepted on the first pass with the customer.  Customers will often ask for changes to the bid forcing you to recalculate and submit the quote again.   With Bid Manager you can easily manage bids, quotes, proposals, and estimates for jobs your business is bidding and quickly make changes during the sales cycle.  Bid Manager can help you focus on closing the deal instead of spending hours recalculating a quote to respond to customer changes. 

While Bid Manager was designed for quotations related to the construction industry, it is well suited to any industry that creates bids or quotes for their customers.  At SCG we use Bid Manager to bid our custom development jobs and websites we design.

Bid manager quote management system is designed for ease of use with maximum flexibility. This bid and quote system is prepared to be used by a novice computer user but with features that allow for great control over the information that is presented.

Construction Jobs

While many jobs that require bids undergo changes during the approval process, with construction jobs changes are very common. For this reason, Bid Manager was designed to quickly adapt to changes the customer may request. Whether the changes are simply to material or they are changes in the design of the job, Bid Manager will quickly and easily manage the change.  The software will allow you to click on the item within the bid and change it. A button within the maintenance panel will allow the bid total to be recalculated.  If there are multiple options within a job the options that are to be included in the bid can be marked with a few clicks and the bid total updated.  Options can then be turned on and off with a click of the mouse as directed by the customer.

Items are the details that make up the bid. A bid can have one item or it may have many items. Any item on the bid can be broken down into sub-items those sub-items can be broken down further if required. This allows a bid to be simple (1 item) or very complex (100 or more items and sub-items). Bid Manager is flexible enough to handle any level of detail your business requires.

Right click on an item to bring up a menu to do maintenance on that item. You can add a sub-item to the item, change the information for the item, or remove the item using this simple menu. Removing the item automatically removes any sub-items that are attached to it and re-totals the bid.

Items can be dragged and dropped from this screen allowing you to quickly and easily reorganize the bid any way you choose.

 

Items can be entered that are not included in the total for the bid. For instance, if a customer has several options that they are considering and would like to know how they will affect the total cost of a bid, this would often require you to enter multiple bids for the same job or modify the existing bid multiple times. With Bid Manager you have another option.

Items can be entered that represent all the available options then selectively turned on and off as needed. Simply click the box labeled Include in total to hide the item from the bid and remove it from the total for the bid. Click the box again to turn the item back on. This allows complete control over what options are included in the bid without double entry or deleting and re-entering items.

In some cases you may wish to break down the cost of an item for your reference but you may not want the customer to see the broken down prices. Simply uncheck the box labeled Print price on bid and the item will appear on the bid but the price will not. This allows you great flexibility in tracking the components of a bid and great control over what appears on the bid that is sent to the customer.

Many factors such as labor, material cost, markup percentage, etc... go into the calculation of the price of a bid item. This can result in the price being calculated to cent. Most of the time you would round this up to the nearest dollar but in some cases you may wish the price to contain the cent values. Bid Manager allows you to decide on each item whether to round the price up to the nearest dollar or not. Simply uncheck the round price box to allow the price to calculate to the nearest cent or check the box to have the price rounded to the nearest dollar.

 

If you have common items that appear on a bid you can create a template for these items and add them to the bid as needed. The example to the right shows a group of items related to a bathroom remodel that form a template.

Items that make up a template can much of the same information that is contained in the bid item including price, markup, and material. They can also contain very little detail being just placeholders for the structure of the template. The level of detail contained in the template is up to the user. Item groups can also be used to enforce company standards in the bidding process.

To add this template or item group to a bid simply drag it to the item in the bid you would like it to appear and drop it on that item. The items in the group will be added to the item in the bid. If prices are included in the items of the template the bid totals will be updated automatically. Once the items from the template have been added to the bid, they can be edited independently without affecting the template.

 

When working with a bid there may be a need to reorganize the bid items. For example, in the bid to the right we have our items entered but now we want to group the items differently. We decide that the bathrooms should be grouped together; however, we do not want to re-enter them under a new group. Instead, we will create a new item called bathrooms and simply move the items under the new one.

Items can be moved around within a bid to reorganize the bid or correct mistakes in entry. Simply drag the item you want to move and drop it on the item you want it to be part of. In our example the Kid's bathroom item and the Master Bath item were dragged on the the newly created Bathrooms item. Now our bid looks like we wanted with the two bathroom items attached to the heading Bathrooms.

This same technique can be used to move items from one bid to another or to split a very large bid into smaller ones. This technique can also be used to create a template or item group from an existing bid.

 

This example illustrates the cost and markup features of Bid Manager. The graphic to the right shows the bid item maintenance screen. There are areas to enter the labor/service cost for the item as well as the material cost. Markups can be entered as a percentage of the cost or as a flat amount or not at all depending on how you do business. Bid Manager is flexible enough to handle your needs.

While not used in the calculation of cost or profit, the projected hours and labor rate can be entered to compare to the final numbers that come in from the job.

 

The graphic to the right illustrates the fields and options available to track customers. A variety of information can be tracked with regards to customers along with notes and document attachments including MS Word documents, saved emails, digital faxes, scanned blueprints, or any other type of computer document saved on your computer.

 

The graphic to the right illustrates the fields and options available to track products. A variety of information can be tracked with regards to products along with notes and document attachments including MS Word documents, product pictures, vendor specs and schematics, instructions on use, or any other type of computer document that can be saved or emailed.

 

Statistics at the bottom of the application show the number of open and closed bids as well as value and accepted percentage. These numbers accumulate over time and can give you a valuable forecasting tool. The accepted bid percentage is the number of accepted bids divided by the total number of jobs bid. The open bids value is the total dollar value of all the open bids. With an expected percentage of bids that are accepted and the total value of the open bids a fair revenue projection can be established. Since this numbers are updated real time this revenue projection continues to become more accurate and more valuable over time.

 

Locate the database on any shared folder or accessible server and many users can use the application and share the information database. As long as each user has a license they can access the database and information concurrently or a single license will provide users access one at a time.