A bid request takes lines you have already estimated and asks trades to price them. Because it starts from the estimate rather than a fresh document, the bids that come back are directly comparable to the number you assumed.
Building the package
Pick the estimate lines you want priced. Each becomes an item on the request, and you can override the quantity, unit or description for the trade's benefit, because your internal wording is often not what a subcontractor needs to see.
Then choose the vendors. Only vendor contacts flagged to receive bids get the invitation, which is how you avoid sending a framing package to a supplier's accounts inbox. If a trade you expected did not receive a request, that flag is almost always why.
A request needs at least one item and at least one vendor before it can be published. Until then it stays a draft, visible only to you.
What the vendor sees
Each invited vendor gets a link into their portal, where they price the request line by line. They can save a draft, come back to it, and submit when ready. After submitting they can revise or withdraw, both of which notify you, so a changed price never arrives silently.
You can see who has opened the request and who has not, which is a more useful prompt for a follow-up call than a due date passing.
Comparing and awarding
Responses come back priced against the same lines, so they sit side by side and the comparison is real rather than an exercise in reading three different PDF layouts. BldrTeam shows what each bid does to your estimated number.
When you award, several things happen at once: the winning response is marked won and the others lost, every vendor is notified (including the ones who did not win, which they will remember), and the winning vendor's recipients are added to the project team so they can see the job from then on.
That last part carries a condition, and nothing tells you when it fails to happen: only recipients who already hold an active, invited portal login are added. A trade who priced the job through a guest link has no account to add, so awarding them puts the job in front of nobody. If you want the winner working in the portal rather than over email, invite them.
When the scope changes after you have published
This happens constantly, so it pays to know the mechanism.
Rather than canceling and starting again, amend the request. BldrTeam takes a snapshot of what the vendors were originally sent, you make your changes, and when you republish it tells the vendors what changed rather than making them diff two documents.
Each vendor then either reaffirms their existing price or submits a new one. A response that was submitted before the amendment is flagged as needing review, so you never compare a bid priced on old scope against one priced on new.
The sequence
- Select the estimate lines to be priced.
- Add the vendors, checking their contacts are flagged for bids.
- Publish, and watch who opens it.
- Compare the responses against your estimate.
- Award. Everyone is told, and a winner who holds a portal login joins the project team.
See vendor management for the wider picture, and the vendor portal for what the trade's side looks like.