Leveling subcontractor quotes

The job

Bid day compresses this job brutally: quotes arrive as PDFs, emails, and phone notes in the final hours, and someone has to line them up — same units, same scope buckets, exclusions surfaced — before award. Missed exclusions here become change orders later.

“Done”: one leveled sheet per trade with every quote mapped to the same scope lines, every stated exclusion listed, and every silence flagged for a phone call.

Use

1. Collect quotes into one folder per trade. PDFs and emails as-is; don’t retype anything.
2. Run extraction. A general-purpose model [1] or precon product [2] pulls price, scope lines, inclusions, exclusions, and alternates into a common table.
3. Review the mapping. Check that differently worded scopes were not incorrectly treated as the same.
4. Chase the silences. Flagged gaps become the call list before award. This is the point; don’t skip it.

Build

This is a strong DIY candidate: document extraction plus tabulation. A v1 is a prompt template asking for every scope line, inclusion, exclusion, and price, one row per scope item, with ambiguity marked. Run it per trade folder and output to a spreadsheet. Keep the transcript in the bid file.

Deploy

Pilot on the last awarded trade package where a scope gap later caused trouble. If the agent’s leveled sheet would have surfaced that gap, it earns a place on the next live bid—still with the estimator reviewing every mapping.

Manage

• The agent proposes; the estimator decides. Every inclusion/exclusion judgment is human.
• Extraction errors are silent. Spot-check totals against the raw quote for at least one quote per trade, every time.
• Sub pricing is confidential. Confirm hosted-model data-retention terms before quotes go in.