Turn a PDF bid form into an import-ready bid schedule

Why estimators convert bid forms

On water, sewer, paving and other unit-price public works, the owner hands you the quantities. The work is not measuring, it is getting the owner's bid schedule into your estimate exactly as written: every item number, every unit, every quantity. When the schedule arrives as pages inside a PDF, often inside a long addendum and sometimes copy-protected, that means retyping dozens or hundreds of lines under bid-day pressure. A skipped line is a line with no price, and on many public bids an unpriced item can make the whole bid non-responsive.

For many state DOT lettings, estimating software already downloads the bid items electronically. BuildGets BID is for everything else: cities, counties, water districts and utilities that publish the bid form as a PDF.

What you get in the Excel file

One clean bid schedule, one row per bid item, in the column order HeavyBid's Excel import expects: Item No. in column A, Description in B, Quantity in C and Unit in D, followed by Unit Price, Extended Price (a live formula), Schedule, Check and Check note. Rows that need a look are shaded, so you can go straight to them. The same data is available as CSV for any other tool, including B2W Estimate, Excel or Google Sheets.

Units are kept exactly as the owner wrote them. EACH and EA, TONS and TON are normalized to one spelling so your reports line up, but nothing is ever converted to another unit. Allowances come out as 1 LS with their dollar amount, the way you would carry them in your estimate.

How the two reads work

The first read goes through the whole document in small blocks of pages, so long addendums are fine. On long documents it first maps where the bid schedule is and concentrates on those pages. The second read works only on the pages that look like a bid form, found by their item lines and US units, and reads them separately. Neither read sees the other's answer.

Then the two lists are compared by item number, without AI. If both reads agree on the unit and the quantity, the item is marked Verified. If they disagree, it is marked Review and the note shows both values, so you only check the lines that need it. If only one read found an item, it is kept and marked Single read. Finally, the item numbering is checked for gaps, and any missing numbers are listed at the top of the result, for example "items 20 to 62", before you download anything.

Bid forms have no prices to check against, so there is no arithmetic that can prove a quantity is right. Two independent reads that agree are the closest thing to proof, and a clear flag where they do not is the next best thing.

What it does not do

BuildGets BID does not measure quantities from drawings; that is takeoff, a different job. It does not price your bid either: unit prices stay blank for you to fill in, or come from your estimating software once the items are imported. And it does not keep your file for anything other than building your Excel. See how it compares with retyping, generic PDF converters and takeoff tools in BuildGets BID compared.

Learn more

Step-by-step: how to import a PDF bid form into HeavyBid. Before bid day: how to check a bid form for missing items. Reference: bid form units explained, bid schedule vs schedule of values and the bid form glossary.