From overnight bid days to 90-minute reviews.
Maxx Builders replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and SmartBidNet exports with PreconIntel — and got their estimators' Thursday nights back.
“We stopped rebuilding the level sheet from email attachments every Thursday. PreconIntel parses the bid the moment it hits the inbox, and by Friday morning our estimators are making decisions instead of typing.”
The problem
Maxx Builders' estimating team was spending bid day rebuilding a level sheet from whatever showed up in email — PDFs, Excel attachments, forwarded threads. Scope lived in PDF footnotes. Subcontractor performance data lived in someone's head. Procore sat on the project-management side of a wall nobody crossed without a CSV export.
Why PreconIntel
Maxx evaluated SmartBidNet, BuildingConnected, and a pair of ERP add-ons. Each was built for a different job — project management, prequalification, accounting — and each required estimators to bend their workflow to fit. PreconIntel was the only tool that started where estimators actually work: the bid inbox.
What changed
Bids now parse on arrival. The Gmail integration routes every sub bid attachment into a structured record with CSI classification, base amount, alternates, inclusions, and exclusions — before an estimator opens the email. Subcontractor intelligence ranks bidders by win rate and CO risk, not by whoever picked up the phone. Procore sync closes the loop: every commitment and change order feeds the next bid's benchmark.
The result
Bid day is a 90-minute review, not a 12-hour rebuild. Estimators catch scope gaps before award, not three months into construction as change orders. And when the same trade bids a similar project six months later, the historical benchmarks are right there — because PreconIntel never stopped collecting them.
Products used
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