Faster Estimates with Excel Import

Hey, I'm Josh over at HCSS. Today what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at the Excel Import feature inside of HeavyBid. What that does is it helps you a whole lot when it comes to the creation portion of your estimates. Now, if you look at the screen, you can see I'm on a screen where I can import from Excel. Now, I'll browse through some of the files that I have, and I have one Excel sheet that is from one of my take-off softwares. If I open this up, I can look at it in more detail and I can see my bid items, my quantities, and how I'm going to measure these items that I need to perform. If I like that, I'll go ahead and minimize it, and you'll notice that those cells already came on through into HeavyBid. So, cell A was for my bid item, B was for the description, so on and so forth. I can say what items I want to bring in from that Excel sheet, and you'll notice that they're already mapped on the right-hand side. This is one of those scenarios where you set it up once and it's done for your future. So, this one process is going to save you a whole lot of time because as soon as I hit import, it's going to process through. And then on this screen here, you'll notice on the left-hand side, I have all of my bid items listed out. Now, this is everything that I need to complete for this job, but what's not here are all of the steps that I need to take to complete that work. So, the way that I'm going to do that is I'll go to this exchange tab, and I'm going to import the way that I normally do this work based on how I've built my system on. As soon as I hit this hammer, you'll notice that it'll process, and it's going to start building things out on the left-hand side here. If you look in the center of the screen, it says 19 activities were created at the total cost of about $1 million. Four-bid items will remain without any activities. Now, ideally, I would go through and I would build those things out, but let's go ahead and take a look at some of the things that we do have that came from that item. I can see in my prep right of way, I have all of these steps that I need to complete. Whenever I select an item just like the clear and grub here, I can see more details on the right-hand side. Up at the top, I have the bid item, the name, and the quantity that we're working with. Especially if I have a different takeoff quantity, I want to take advantage of that. Now, in the middle of the screen, I have my activity information as far as what we're performing and how much of a quantity I have for that, too. At the bottom, I can overlook all of the resources that I'll need, such as the equipment, laborers, materials, or even subcontractors. When all is said and done, if I like how I have all of my costs built out in this estimate, I can start working on the pricing portion. The way that we're going to do that is we're going to go over to the bid summary screen. In the bid summary screen, on the left-hand side, I can see how all of my cost buckets are broken out. My labor, burden, materials, my equipment expenses, so on and so forth. Now, to the right of that, I can see all of my markup percentages, and I can designate how much of a percentage I want to make on each one of these costs. You'll see those dollars on the right-hand side. And in total, I'll have about $93,000 I'll be making on this one job. If I like how this looks, I can look at the total desired bid price in yellow, and then I can start going to price out my estimate item by item in the unit pricing screen. We also call it the Bid Pricing screen. Here, I can overlook all of the balance prices I'm getting from that markup percentage, as well as type in whatever I truly want my unit price to be, right here. If I like how everything looks, I can move on to the proposal. Now, on the proposal side, I can create my own custom proposal, create something from Word, create something from DOTs or even the Excel export that we have. With proposals, I can create my own custom proposal, my own Word proposal, a DOT, or an Excel proposal as well. Now, I'll show you an example of a Word one. In here, I have my letterhead at the top, my company logo, my address, who I'm sending this to, as well as all of the items that I'm giving the price for, and my grand total. If I have any inclusions or exclusions, I can make sure that I have those inside of my Word document, and I can also edit it here if I want to. Now, you can go ahead and send this proposal off to the project owner or to the DOT. To recap, the Excel import inside of HeavyBid can help you in creating your estimates a lot faster, and you can take that all the way down to the bid proposal and sending those off. If you have any questions about this feature or about how our software can help you better improve your workflow, feel free to give us a call, chat, or request a custom demonstration on our website.