The name BidUnity reflects our understanding of a proposal's relationship to the project and our ambition to provide glazing contractors with a complete framework. We provide many time-saving features, which are the focus of this discussion, but we are not finished, we welcome your feedback to improve BidUnity for glazing contractors everywhere. You can learn more about the future of BidUnity in our development plans.
Hopefully you had a chance to read about how BidUnity supports best practices for construction estimating. We walked through the process of creating a proposal and concluded with 'finalizing' it. Finalizing a proposal prevents it from being changed; it can be copied to make revisions, but finalizing a proposal results in a strictly defined scope of work, material lists, and budgets.
After a proposal is finalized and before you can start managing the project, a proposal must be 'accepted'. BidUnity is loaded with features and functionality; we try to provide the simplest possible interface depending on the context of the project you are viewing. After accepting the proposal, project administration features become available.
We've all inadvertently missed billing deadlines, it is a consequence of accommodating variation in contract terms. BidUnity allows you to record some of the important contract terms so that it knows how to support the administration of the project. You will have to let us know how improvements which can better support your business.
The schedule of values is created when the proposal is finalized. We understand that everyone wants to have the opportunity to distribute values in the best possible way, but if our approach doesn't work be sure to let us know. We take 6% of the project's total value plus any project-level overhead expenses to be mobilization. For each work type we have 'labor' and 'material' according to 94% of the respective proposed values. Any work type level associated overhead expenses are listed as 'work type mobilization' for that work type.
Your submittals are created when the proposal is finalized. Based on the selected products and systems, we pull together associated product literature, print out the specifications for each work type, and provide the ability to link to test reports. It makes a pretty complete package. We plan on adding door and hardware schedules if applicable as well as elevation drawings. Eventually, we expect to be able to fully support the needs of your product submission process. Let us know what we have not included so that we can shore this up for all our users.
Supplier Quotes, purchasing, and receiving amounts to a lot of paperwork. We provide tools to help you keep track of materials as well as which of the ordered items have been back-ordered.
Our progress billing is similar in form to AIA-702 and 703 forms. We provide a logical way to manually update the percentages completed and bill for retention. When scheduling and daily reporting are fully integrated, you probably will not have to handle these forms, but for the time being we fill them out for you.
We provide the ability to save files to the project so that everyone on your team can access them as needed. In addition to attaching documents, we also create them for you.
Your company may or may not use this feature, but we provide the ability for your company to document project information on the fly, kind of like a blog, for each project. Everyone can reference the commentary, it is fast and easy to make notes, and each comment tells us when and who contributed the information.
Managing contact information is critical to collaborating with coworkers. We provide you with the means of associating points of contact with project roles. As we continue to connect the dots behind the scenes, you will spend less time sharing and transcribing contact information.
Filling in redundant information on forms used to drive us nuts, but our server doesn't mind doing it for you. We decided to support the pre-population of standard construction forms to save everyone time. For example, when you create a project, you provide the address. It stands to reason that you shouldn't have to tell BidUnity what the address is every time you have to fill out another form for the project.