The bid tabulation your estimators hand-key into Excel — bidders across the top, your scope items down the side — generated automatically from the PDFs. Normalized unit prices, side-by-side totals, and a scored ranking, without a single number retyped.
You've got 9 sub bids for the earthwork package sitting in your inbox, each a PDF in its own format. To compare them, someone opens Excel and starts keying: line item, unit price, extension, bidder by bidder, page by page. It's an afternoon of transcription before anyone can even see who's actually low.
And the tab is only as good as the typing. A unit price entered in the wrong row, a missed line, a quantity off by a digit — and the side-by-side that drives a six-figure award is quietly wrong. The work that should be reading the bids becomes a race to copy them down before the numbers go stale.
Three steps. The tab assembles itself from the bids you already received.
Drop in every sub bid for the package, in whatever format each sub sent. Bid Reasoner reads each PDF and extracts every line item — unit prices, quantities, extensions — no template required.
Each bidder's line items are mapped and normalized to your scope of work, so the same item lines up across every bid. One bidder's price for a row sits next to everyone else's price for that same row.
Bidders become columns, your scope items become rows, and the normalized unit prices and totals fill in — with risk flags and a scored ranking. Export it as a working tab and as .docx.
The shape is exactly what you'd build by hand: your scope of work down the left, each subcontractor a column across the top, unit price and extended total in every cell, and a totals row at the bottom that tells you who's low. The difference is that nobody typed it — it's read straight from the PDFs and normalized to your scope, so the same work compares cleanly across bidders who all formatted their bids differently.
Because the tab is normalized rather than transcribed, it carries more than numbers. Each cell traces back to a page-cited quote in the source bid, so you can click a price and see exactly where it came from. Scope-coverage gaps surface right in the tab — items in your SOW a bidder never quoted, and items a bidder bid that aren't in your SOW — so an artificially low total isn't actually a missing scope you'd catch only after award.
Deterministic rules and a fixed scoring model — not an opaque black box.
Every bidder scored on price, scope, schedule, compliance, performance, and risk.
Rank the tab by Lowest Responsible Bid, Best Value, Lowest Risk, and four more.
Deterministic flags for unbalanced unit prices, peer outliers, total outliers, and front-loaded mobilization.
The state-DOT baselines built in for normalization, alongside NY + NJ DOT baselines.
| Excel / manual | Generic bid software | Bid Reasoner | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tab built from the bid PDFs | Hand-keyed, line by line | Re-entered by hand | Auto-extracted |
| Unit prices normalized to your scope | Manual, error-prone | No | Normalized to your SOW |
| Unbalanced & outlier line items flagged | Eyeball it | No | 4 deterministic rules |
| Scope gaps surfaced in the tab | Found after award | No | Missing & extra items shown |
| Every cell traceable to the source bid | No | No | Page-cited quote |
A bid tabulation — the bid tab — is the side-by-side table a GC builds to compare every subcontractor bid for a package, with bidders as columns and scope line items as rows, showing each bidder's unit prices and extended totals. It's how an estimator lays out who bid what, line by line, so the numbers can be compared apples to apples. Bid Reasoner builds the tab automatically from the bid PDFs instead of having someone hand-key it into Excel.
Yes — that's the point. Bid Reasoner reads each subcontractor bid PDF, extracts every line item, and lays out the side-by-side tab for you, so you stop hand-keying numbers from PDFs into a spreadsheet. You still get a working, exportable tab; you just don't build it by hand or risk a transcription error.
Bid Reasoner reads each PDF in whatever format the sub sent, extracts every line item, and maps it to your scope of work so the same work lines up across bidders. Unit prices are normalized to your SOW — including against built-in state-DOT pay-item baselines and statewide-average baselines where they apply — so one bidder's price for an item sits next to every other bidder's price for that same item.
Yes. Four deterministic risk rules run on the tab: unbalanced unit prices at or below $1.00, peer outliers more than 2x or under 0.5x the peer median, total-bid outliers more than 20% from the field, and front-loaded mobilization above 10% of the total. These are fixed rules, not an opaque score, so you can see exactly why a line or a bid got flagged.
They're two views of the same work. Bid leveling is the act of normalizing every bid to a common scope and scoring the bidders; the bid tabulation is the side-by-side table that comes out of it. Bid Reasoner does both — see the bid leveling software page for the scoring and decision-mode side.
No. Bid Reasoner is not takeoff or quantity-estimating software. It analyzes the subcontractor bids you receive — leveling them, tabulating them, scoring them, and documenting the award — rather than producing quantities. It complements estimating tools like HCSS HeavyBid and B2W.
Yes. You get the exportable bid tabulation plus seven auto-generated Word documents per award — including the Reasoned Award Memo and an Evidence Report — each backed by page-cited quotes from the source bid PDFs. Everything that supports the tab travels with it.
Yes. Built-in DOT baselines for select states are available, but not required to start. In any US state, Bid Reasoner normalizes each bidder against the peer median of your own received bids — so you can build a tab and catch outliers with no government pricing data at all.
Bring one package's sub bids. We'll read the PDFs, normalize the unit prices, and put the side-by-side tab on the screen on the call.