Bid tabulation

Definition

A bid tabulation is the worksheet a general contractor builds after sub bids come in on a package. Each bidder gets a column, each scope item gets a row, and every cell holds that bidder's unit price and extended total for that line. The bottom row carries each bidder's package total side by side. The point is to read 5 to 15 bids against one common scope instead of flipping between PDFs in different formats.

A bid tab is only as honest as the rows behind it. Leveling — the normalization that maps each sub's line items to your scope and fills coverage gaps — is what makes the columns comparable in the first place.

A worked example

Say a drainage package has three sub bids. Lay the key pay items side by side:

• 15" RCP pipe (LF): Bidder A $58.00, Bidder B $61.50, Bidder C $44.00
• Catch basin, type 2 (EA): Bidder A $3,200, Bidder B $3,350, Bidder C $2,600
• Trench excavation (CY): Bidder A $42.00, Bidder B $45.00, Bidder C $33.00
• Package total: Bidder A $486,000, Bidder B $498,000, Bidder C $383,000

Bidder C lands 22% below the A/B average of roughly $492,000. The tab makes that gap visible at a glance, and it tells you exactly where the gap lives — every line is low, not one item. That is the cue to check whether C is missing scope before you treat the low total as a real number.

Why it matters when you evaluate sub bids

A low package total means nothing until you can see the line items behind it. The bid tab is where a missing pay item, a unit-price typo, or a front-loaded mobilization shows itself. Without the side-by-side view, a GC awards on a bottom-line number and inherits whatever scope the low bidder quietly left out. With it, you can defend the pick line by line.

How Bid Reasoner handles it

Bid Reasoner auto-builds the bid tab straight from the sub bid PDFs — no hand-keyed Excel. It reads each bidder's PDF, normalizes unit prices to your scope of work, and lays out the side-by-side tab with extended totals. Four deterministic risk rules flag the rows that matter: unbalanced unit prices (a line at or below $1.00), peer outliers (a unit price above 2x or below 0.5x the peer median), total-bid outliers (more than 20% off), and front-loaded mobilization (over 10% of the total). Each flag cites the source bid PDF by page.