Read the bid package before you price it

Each prompt block below has a Copy button. Copy it into whichever of the four tools you use and press enter, and the lesson works the same in all four. Read the package below once first, the way you would read it on a Monday, and count how many of the documents it talks about are in the folder it came in.

Here is the list, already written. You are not asking a tool to produce it, because whether your tool makes this mistake today is beside the point. This one is fixed, so the lesson is the same for everybody. Send it back through the tool with the package beside it and make the tool do the comparison.

Before you read the explanation below, run your own finger down the eighteen lines and mark the ones that are not in the folder. Then compare. If your tool caught every one of them, keep that answer. The draft is a fixed test, not a bet that every tool fails it.

• My audit put nine of the eighteen lines in the folder and the other nine outside it
• I found section 03 30 00 only by opening a document I do have, at paragraph 2.3 of attached section 05 51 00
• My audit marked the last line of the draft wrong: this package is not complete and not ready for pricing

Notice where it came from. A bid package reads like an index. The invitation's own sentences and the specification's cross references both tell you which documents this work sits inside, and neither of them is a statement that a document arrived. The tool turned the index into an inventory, which is one word of difference and the whole job. This is the shape of the failure all the way through this track. The draft is built out of what such a document usually contains, not out of what these papers say you are holding.

This is the Contract Document Check, and this is the only lesson that prints it in full. Pick the statement with the greatest consequence if wrong, name the document that speaks to it and open it to the line, write down the clock that document starts and who is watching it, obtain the responsible person's review, and where no document speaks to it name the person whose call it is.

Run it on this package before you build anything. Here is one worked pass, and the pick at the front of it is yours to make: an estimator who reads the subcontract sentences as the costliest thing on the page has picked well too. Take the statement that the price covers section 05 50 00, because the invitation invites 05 50 00 and paragraph 1.3 of the section you do have sends the lintels and embeds into it. The document that speaks to that is section 05 50 00 itself, and it is not in the folder, so there is no line to open. This invitation starts two clocks and the estimator watches both: the bid date, 12 February 2026 at 2:00 p.m., and the date the invitation says addenda stop, 10 February 2026, which is the last day the package can change before the bid goes in. The contract administrator reviews the inventory before anybody prices a line of it. And where no document speaks to it, name the person: Contractor G's project engineer holds section 05 50 00, and routing that request is the contract administrator's. Naming the hole is today's job. Filling it is not, and deciding whose scope the embedded plates land in is a contract question that belongs to the contract administrator, not to you and not to the tool.

• I picked the statement in this package with the greatest consequence if wrong, named the document that speaks to it, and wrote down whether that document is in the folder
• I wrote down both clocks this invitation starts, the bid date of 12 February 2026 at 2:00 p.m. and the addenda cutoff of 10 February 2026, and that the estimator is watching them
• The inventory goes to the contract administrator for review before anyone prices a line of it, and I wrote that on the page
• I asked Contractor G nothing today, and I priced nothing today

Now change one fact and watch which rows move. Addendum 1 lands on 4 February 2026, by its own transmittal and not with the invitation. It answers three bidder questions and it requires every proposal to list the addenda it includes. Nothing else about the package has changed.

• My inventory has two columns and I can say in one breath what each one is for: what I am holding, and what these papers name and nobody has sent me
• I can say the Contract Document Check without scrolling back: the costliest statement, the document that speaks to it opened to the line, the clock and who watches it, the responsible person's review, and where no document speaks, the person whose call it is
• I saved the inventory as a file of my own, with the invitation number and its date on the top of it