If you are tracking the budget for your project in CoConstruct, then you can tie your bid requests directly into the other financial areas of your project.
Adding cost lines from your estimate to a bid
When you create a bid request, you will be asked to add "Bid lines" for each individual item that you want your bidders to price out for you.
And since your estimate is integrated with your project's budget and specs/selections, pulling from these estimate cost lines will help keep everything synced up. Plus, this will save you time and help you avoid double entry down the road when you need to push those financials back into the other areas of your project.
When you select cost lines from your estimate as new bid lines, you will see a condensed view of the estimate, which you can filter based on accounting code. Then, simply select any of the cost lines that you want to add to the current request.
The following information is copied into the bid request and will be visible in the bid invitation that will be sent to your partners:
- Selection name
- Specification information
- Trade Partner information
- Option descriptions
- Cost line names, quantities, and unit types
So, by simply checking the cost lines you want, you've immediately populated the bid request with a lot of great additional detail. It saves you time and the additional detail should help you get a more accurate and timely bid back from your trade partner.
Pushing a bid amount back to the estimate
Selecting cost lines from your estimate will let you later push final bid amounts back into your estimate to update the financials in your estimate, specs/selections, and budget and keep everything in line with the final bids.
For any bid lines that you initially pulled from your estimate, you can push the final bid amounts back to the estimate at any time, either before or after awarding the bid.
When you push the bid to the estimate, the following information in your estimate will be overwritten with the new information from your bid:
- Quantity
- Unit type
- Unit cost
To do this, from your bid request select the name of the trade partner with the bid you wish to push > select "Push to estimate" > choose which line(s) from that bid you want to update > Push.
Restrictions on pushing a bid to the estimate
There are a few scenarios where you will not be able to push amounts from a bid to your estimate:
- If the name, accounting code, or cost type of a cost line has changed in your estimate since the time you first pulled down the bid lines, you will still be able to push the bid, but you will see a warning to first verify that you still want to overwrite the updated estimate information.
- If a cost line has since been deleted from the estimate, then you will not be able to push the bid to the estimate, since there is no longer a place for the amounts to go.
- If a cost line has been attached to a change order, then you will not be able to overwrite the information for that line in the estimate.
- If you selected to "Add custom" for the bid line, you will not be able to push the amount since it isn't tied to any estimate cost lines.