Before the Bid: Data Driven Decisions that Win Work July 2025

Today is our second so our second of three webinars that we're doing. That's all about HeavyBid Preconstruction. So, we're calling it before the bid series, and we're just trying to teach you guys the benefits of connecting HeavyBid to HeavyBid Preconstruction. So we will dive into the most important features that you should be using today in pre construction and showing you how this helps you in your estimating process. Also, we do have if you are on your computers there's a resources section in Zoom where we do have some materials for you. So we have how to set up preconstruction brand new academy videos. We have how to get to the how to start using HeavyBid in preconstruction as well as setting it up and connecting it together. We also have a handout on giving you a recap of this webinar today as well as a handout on the free versus paid features for HeavyBid pre construction. All right and then we're going to kick off some introductions. You might have seen me a few times. My name is Melissa Teague and I'm the product marketing manager for our estimating products. So HeavyBid and HeavyBid Preconstruction and basically, I work really closely with our product team, our customers, and help shape the messaging and developing our resources so that you can get you guys can get the most out of our software today. And I will kick it over to Paul. Alright. Hey, guys. Sorry about that. My name is Paul Lambert. I am the technical product manager within HeavyBid, currently looking over HeavyBid preconstruction and a couple of other areas. I've been with the company for about two years now and work to take the ideas that we have from the product managers and the feedback from our customers and implement that into new features and bug fixes and stuff in the way that is most beneficial to the largest number of customers that we can to keep the product running strong for you. I will hand it over to Kyle here. Hey. My name is Kyle Brundage. I'm one of the business solutions analysts over in the support department in the escalating vertical of HCSS. If you've ever found yourself with a real serious issue and you had to call in to support, there's a chance we've spoken on the phones together. I've been here for coming up on three years, and we'll be taking part in some of the demos today. Thanks so much, Kyle. Alright. So today's agenda, We're going to give a short recap of what we talked about in last month's webinar, so syncing your systems. We're going to talk about the power of estimate insights. So that's what you're going to be learning about all today. You're going to see a demo of the different estimate insights that we have in preconstruction. And we are going to do a quick recap of how to sync and archive those estimates in HeavyBid Desktop so that the two systems are talking with each other. And a Q and A, of course, at the end. But if you have any questions throughout this webinar, please drop them in the chat. I'll call it out to the team and we can get your questions answered on the spot. All right, so real quick recap. You probably have heard it a lot lately, but if you don't know what HeavyBid Preconstruction is, basically it is a web based tool for project tracking and estimate management. And it's also meant to be used simultaneously with HeavyBid. So you're going to be as soon as you get notice that there is an upcoming project that you may or may not want to bid on, you're going to hurry up and you're going to throw all of that in pre construction. So put all those high level project details into the system. And then that's where you're going to be tracking everything from what do you want to bid on, what's available to bid on, what you're currently bidding on, what you did bid on, did you win it, did you lose it. All of those details you're going to get that bird's eye view which is really nice to see. And then by connecting HeavyBid Preconstruction and heavyBid, it's going to help you just streamline that whole preconstruction workflow. It should just make your life easier and faster and more efficient. And so you'll be doing your bid management, then your cost estimate, your analysis, and submissions in just one easy workflow. And if you haven't heard already, this tool is free. So HeavyBid Preconstruction is free and you can turn it on today. Alright. My mouse here. Okay. So, this gives you a nice little visual of what you can do in preconstruction and what you can do in HeavyBid. So preconstruction, we just talked about you can do your project tracking, but also calendar management. So getting in those pre bid dates, those bid dates, anything that's important to you, see it there in your calendar, so nice and organized. Your contact management, put all of your owner details, your vendor details in contact management, your estimate insights, run those reports, verify those gut checks, which we're going to talk about today. And then in HeavyBid, that's where we're going to go and do all that detailed cost estimating, reviewing it and then submitting it. And a quick recap of what we talked about last week last month, to refresh everyone's memories, is that over in HeavyBid Preconstruction, we do our bid management. And then in HeavyBid is where we're going do our cost estimating. But all of those project details that are in HeavyBid Preconstruction, that's going to sync to HeavyBid desktop. So you don't have to rekey anything. It's going to be there. Everything's ready, kicked off, ready to go from when you start estimating. So that's also a great benefit of starting to sync everything. Also, then you go in HeavyBid, you're doing that detailed cost estimating, and then all of that data that you have now, like in desktop, is going to be pushed into precon. And all that hard work you're doing, all those numbers, all the hard work you've got to get those numbers, that's going be pushed to estimate insights. So then you can start running those reports and just verifying things and triple checking things or sharing with the owners, biz development teams, and such. And then syncing estimates, this allows preconstruction to pull your historical cost data like we talked about, your historical price data, and project scope patterns. And this benefits you because you're going to save time by streamlining your preconstruction workflows. You're going to be a bit faster with synced project data, reducing manual data entry, and better data, better transparency. So you could share that like I spoke about with key stakeholders. All right. And so just the power of estimate insights, as you know, most bad bids happen not because of lack of effort. It's just due to a lack of visibility. So this is just an extra measure for you guys just to kind of spot check things. In Estimate Insights it gives you context to what you're bidding based on real data. All right and we are gonna start a poll. Okay, so we want to know how are you currently tracking key performance indicators across your estimates. Are you using Excel or another spreadsheet? Historical bid data? Experience or gut feelings? I've heard that a lot. You're not currently tracking your KPIs. A different dashboard or reporting tool or HeavyBid Preconstruction estimate insights. All right, I'll give it a few seconds. All right, things are slowing down here. Okay, so I just shared the results. It looks like ultimately it's a tie. You're either not tracking your KPIs or you're using Excel or another spreadsheet. So that's great. You're here today for a reason, right? All right, and I am going to kick it off to Kyle to give you a demo. Thank you very much, Melissa. I will grab the screen share, pull up my preconstruction here. Alright. So we should have it up on the screen now. Let me know if y'all can see it over on that side, but this is gonna be just the the project dashboard over in HCSS Preconstruction. We're gonna start off just hopping into estimate insights. It's gonna be up on our top navigation bar. We'll see Estimate Insights. We're just gonna give it a click to head over into that next screen. First thing we notice in here is it is going to look very similar to our Projects dashboard, and we're gonna have a lot of similar options in here. We'll notice that we've got our table down below with our various headings, just like in the projects dashboard. We can click on the three dots on the right hand side of this table to adjust the columns we want displayed. We'll also be able to save these templates for future use if we wanna have different filters here in our projects. And the reason we may wanna filter them down, we'll get into a little bit later, But just as it is with projects, sometimes it's simpler to simply search out a single code. For our demonstrations here, I'll be using the Estimate one Paving. Now when I want to actually drill down into the Estimate Insights for my estimate, I'll click on the blue link for one paving, and it's gonna take us to the Estimate Details screen. Those of you who are, you know, familiar with HeavyBid Desktop, I imagine probably gonna be most of us here in the webinar. This is looking into the information on the screen gonna seem familiar as well. This is all information that's being pulled from the Setup Estimate Info screen in HeavyBid Desktop once those estimates have been synced up to preconstruction. So one thing I do want to point out, because it's probably going to be useful in the future as you're syncing estimates up, is your master estimates, if you want to exclude them from KPIs. Usually these are blank estimates or don't have a whole lot of real data in them. You go ahead and check this box in the top right to exclude that estimate. And it's gonna remove it from KPIs in the future. So let's actually get into the good stuff and take a look at our key indicators for my one paving estimate. Over on the left hand side of the screen, I'll have another navigation bar, and I'll go ahead and click into Key Indicators. So sort of the first thing that's going to jump out to us is we're going have a graphical analysis here, essentially just a pie chart. It's gonna tell us our total number of KPIs, it's color coded. We'll have a table on the left hand side that's gonna show all of the estimates that have been synced up that we're comparing for these key performance indicators. So by default right now, I'm looking at all of my synced estimates. This is most likely going to be what you wanna use for estimates that you're currently bidding, compare them against recent estimates. If you want to take a look at further back historical data, estimates that are no longer active, you can also click into the dropdown, look at your archived estimates. Or if you wanna see the whole picture for all estimates that have been archived and synced, you can select the option for all estimates as well. Now for today, we are gonna focus on the more recent information, so I'll stick with synced estimates. And we'll actually get into what some of the information on this screen is. If I navigate over to the right hand side and start to hover over my color coded bars and the KPIs by category section, I can see that hovering over the green, this is going to be my visual indicator for KPIs that fall within the normal range. If I take a look at my Labor category, in the right hand side, also have two that are color coded as yellow. These are going to be my warning KPIs, my first indicator that I've got, and some things may be a little different about this estimate compared to historical data. So if I want to get more information on these two warnings, navigating down, I'll click into the labor button just below, clicking on my drop down to expand it. And I'll see right here jumping out at me with our yellow color coding, our two KPIs that are outside the typical range for estimates are going to be my base labor as a fraction of the total labor in the estimate, as well as my burden calculation as a fraction of the total labor. One thing that I may wanna do at this stage, just to make sure that I'm comparing a sort of apples to apples situation, is I know that I'm looking at all of my estimates that are synced into preconstruction. I have the option to filter this down based on categories that are set in precon. So this is gonna be similar to the Projects dashboard. If I click into the Filter tab, click Add Filters, I'm going to use Type of Work as my filtering option. So I'll check that box and click Close. And then again, actually setting a value for this filter, clicking into the Type of Work button that's just appeared at the top, and I'll include just my civil estimates that have been synced up. Clicking back into my dashboard, I'm now looking at just this pool of five estimates that I have tagged as civil work and preconstruction. And I'll see that now with a more narrow comparison, I have a few more things that are jumping out as warnings when I'm looking at just civil estimates. So scrolling down through these now, I'll see that even when comparing apples to apples in my Civil, my labor is still a bit out of the normal range. Scrolling down further, I know that I also have subcontract that I want to take a look at. One thing that I'll see that's different in the subcontract compared to the labor in this case, So if I look at the graphic over on the right hand side here in the Plot section, I'll see that I have a visual indicator of where in that range is my subcontract compared to other estimates. My normal range is denoted by this color coded section in the center. And I can see that for all of my key indicators for subcontractors, I'm just on the edge of being within normal range. So a bit of an indicator that this may be something for me to take a look at, but it's also close enough to normal estimates that maybe I don't have to lose sleep over it. Scrolling down to our other section, I'll take a look up at the top and see where I was in the Materials. I know I want to take a look at Materials as well because of the quick color coding. And we'll see a similar story as to what was seen over in the Subcontract section. Looking at my plots, I can see that they're just outside the normal range. So again, something I likely want to take a look at, but not necessarily a huge difference that's outside the normal range, as what we would see with our labor indicators here at the top. So again, just that visual indication here on the plot, I can see that my base labor is a significantly lower fraction of my total labor cost to what I'm used to, whereas my burden is significantly higher. Potentially an error somewhere in the estimate, or a wildly different scope compared to what I'm usually working with. So there is going to be one more category aside from normal and warnings. And we'll demonstrate this with a second estimate. Navigating up to our drop down menu on the top left, right next to our back button, I'm to click into this, and I'm going to go into my one pipeline estimate. Now it's going to immediately take me to the estimate details for one pipeline. In my sort of demo data, the idea that I have here is that I'm just getting into pipeline industry. This is kind of my first time navigating these jobs. We're normally a, you know, heavy civil highway construction company, but we're exploring new areas where we could potentially develop. Jumping into this, I still have my filter up at the top, comparing to my civil estimates. And I can see immediately I have several categories, in my case, equipment, materials, and my markup, all in the outlier range compared to my Civil estimates. Taking a look into the Equipment section, I do wanna see what's so different about Pipeline compared to Civil, and scrolling down until I see my highlighted red categories. And I can see that for pipeline work, it looks like I'm renting significantly more equipment compared to what we would, you know, use in a highway sort of estimate. Knowing again that this is kind of my first couple of estimates for pipeline, we may not necessarily have all the equipment on hand to tackle highway work. So this is a huge outlier, but at least I can see it and think on what may be the cause for this situation. If I wanted to, again, do a little bit more of an apples to apples comparison in this case, I could return to my type of work filter up top, and say, how do I compare to my past pipeline estimates? Am I at least in line with what we've worked with those in the past? Click on, again, my filter at the top, click the x next to Civil to remove it, and then select Pipeline to compare against my other estimate. And I can see that I at least so far have consistent work in my pipeline estimating. Nothing is wildly out of expectations for what we've done in the past. We can see that this is a very small pool, we're likely to see more variance in the future. But as I'm just getting started, it's a bird's eye view to keep an eye on what's different and what's the same between my different estimating categories. One other thing that we will see in Estimate Insights that's certainly worth mentioning is going to be over in the tab just below Key Indicators. I can click into the reporting section, and we'll see three reports that are straight from HeavyBid. This is going to be a nice way, I know a call we get very frequently in the support department is, all of our licenses are locked up, how can I kick someone out so I can get back in? If you have access to HeavyBid Preconstruction, and you just want to have someone who's taking a look at reports, you don't need to lock up a license just to take a look. Simply navigate again to estimate insights into our reporting section, and then click into your, say, estimate recap report. This is exactly the same report you would see in HeavyBid, now accessible from a web platform rather than the desktop application. With that, Melissa, I will send it back to you. Alright. Thank you, Kyle. All right. So just recapping what Kyle just showed everyone. This is going to allow you to compare, highlight, and discover the flow of your data through this key indicators dashboard. And the benefits is to help estimators help you guys avoid mistakes, to verify that pricing and explain differences upstream, whether it's owners, business development teams, whoever that you need to communicate this to. And next up, we're going to go into some other insight pieces, our materials dashboard. But before we have Paul demo that for you guys, we're going to kick off another poll here. So how do you currently track material costs during the estimating process? Do you do HeavyBid Preconstruction materials dashboard, which you're going to learn about now. If you're already using it, great. Are you using spreadsheets? Are you just doing it in your estimating system but not easily? Are you using historical data or past jobs? Or you don't really have a consistent method it's just different every time. All right, I'll give this another few seconds. Looks like a lot of you are doing it in your Estimating System, but not easily. Okay. All right, so it looks like everyone's using your estimating system. Next up is either in spreadsheets or the third in place is with historical data or past jobs. And then some of you don't really have a consistent method. But, one of you is using HeavyBid Preconstruction materials dashboard, so that's great. All right. So, now we're going to turn it over to Paul and show you the materials dashboard. Thanks Melissa. Two quick housekeeping items. First, Stacy, I see the question. We'll be answering that towards the end of the webinar here. We're not ignoring it. Second, I'm not sure if Melissa said it or not. I know all of you came to see my beautiful face. Unfortunately, I'm currently having internet issues and having to use my mobile hotspot. So I'm trying to save as much bandwidth as possible by not having the webcam on. I will be back for the next webinar, I promise. But let's go ahead and jump here into Materials dashboard. Is everybody able to see my screen? Awesome. All right. So back in, HeavyBid Preconstruction, up at the top under estimate insights, Kyle was just showing you how to, use those key performance indicators to look at some of the different indicators there and make sure that everything lines up with what you expect, and where it is in the normal range. One of those that he showed was the materials. So if you run into an estimate where maybe that's out of the range that you're expecting, or even if you just want a deeper dive into the materials, we can do that by going into those estimates here. So here, I'm going to search for a an estimate that I know I want to take a closer look at because the material costs were a little bit weird. I wanna get a better understanding of that. So on the same, same steps as before, we're going to click on the blue link, and it brings us back into this estimate information screen that we already saw. Except this time, instead of going to key indicators on the left, we're instead going to go down to the materials tab. When I click on the materials tab, it's going to give me a bunch of different information, and we're gonna break this down quite a bit. The first thing that we wanna look at at the top because it's going to affect the rest of the screen is our material type. So right now, this is broken into permanent material and construction material. These are your two codes and your three codes in HeavyBid desktop. It defaults to permanent material, but I can change that over if I want to instead look at my construction materials. Here, we, we only have one construction material, so that makes it easy. We're going look at permanent materials to give us a little bit, more diversity in our view. Next thing on the screen right here, we have our top five materials from this estimate, and there's two different ways that we can calculate this. The first is in the cost per unit. So the most expensive, dollar per unit of that material, dollar per ton or per yard or whatever it is. And the other is the total material cost, which means I don't care how much it costs per unit. If I'm using two hundred thousand of this material, it's probably going to cost more total. So these are the two different views that we have. In this graph, we're going to show you the code for each material and the amount that we have according to this bottom part. So right now we're in cost per unit, and we can see this 2RS material is the most expensive per unit, which is three hundred dollars each. Next most expensive is eighty point seven seven dollars per ton, and so on. So these are just the top five, in this case, in the cost per unit or in the total material cost, to see what are the materials that are most affecting the bid that I'm currently looking at or sorry, the estimate that I'm currently looking at. So if I look at this and I know that my material costs for permanent materials was unusually high, or even if I'm just looking at this estimate and before I look at key indicators, I know that I want to get my material costs down, This is the perfect place to be able to do that. I can look at this and say, sure, I can try and negotiate a ten percent discount on one of my items. Which item should that be? Well, looking at this graph, it's probably going to be most impactful if it's this, two RS nine three, this top one here, for eight hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars. If I can get a ten percent discount on that, that moves the needle a lot more than if I get a ten percent discount on my ten thousand dollar material down at the bottom here. So this gives us a good starting place. One of the other things that we can do within here, if I scroll down, if I know I have a particular material that I want to see, I can search the materials here by just typing in the code. So I might take this top one, for instance, and just copy that and rub it in here, and it'll show me the one here. The first thing it does is it tells me the total amount of the material. So in this case, I'm using a hundred and sixty four thousand square yards. And then it also shows me the unit cost. But I can expand this, and it's also going to show me where in my estimate is this being used. Is this just a material for one activity that's costing a lot of money? Is this something that's used in a large portion of my activities, so I'm using a small quantity in a large number of places? Things like that. So it'll show me my bid item, my activity, the quantity being used in that activity, the unit unit cost, and then the total calculation. So this gives me a lot more information about any of the pieces that I know I need to look at so that I can figure out which of these materials are the most impactful on my estimate, and b) which of these is it realistic for me to be able to pursue and reduce that cost or find another way to spread that throughout the estimate, or address this in whatever way makes sense for the estimate that I am looking at. This works the exact same way for construction material. In this particular, estimate, we only have one material, so it's only showing the one, but it would show five. Same thing with being able to look through all the materials down at the bottom and see where they're used. So for both construction and permanent, this is a great way for you to be able to get a little bit better understanding of what materials are being used in your estimate, where they're being used, and how those are affecting the estimate themselves. I will quickly address I haven't been looking at the question, but I assume that we're probably going to have a question on materials outside of permanent and construction materials, materials that we're using that are not a two code or a three code. We have gotten requests for the ability to look at other codes. So if you self supply or you're using some other type of material in here that you want to be able to look at, that is something that we're we're currently researching. We have heard you. It's not currently available, but it is something that we're we're currently, researching how that would look and how best to implement that. And that is everything on materials dashboards. Do we have any questions on that before I turn it back over to Melissa? We have one question, Paul. It is, can we compare material costs between estimates and things like look at trends and pricing over time? The current version that we're looking at here only addresses one particular estimate. So this is looking at the material cost for this estimate, not compared to other estimates. We are looking to improve functionality for reporting across estimates to be able to say, similar to how we saw for key performance indicators, to be able to say, Okay, in this particular estimate, how does my material cost for these things compare to other estimates? But that is not currently available to everybody. That is something that we're still looking at as an improvement for the future. All right. If anybody else runs into other questions, feel free to throw them in the chat. We will be, like we said, having the question and answer at the end. I will turn it back over to Melissa briefly for poll question. All right. Okay, so our next poll question here is still around the material. So who typically handles material pricing on your team? Is it estimators, procurement purchasing, a mix of both, or other? All right. We'll give it a few more seconds. Estimators is very much high in the lead. All right. I'm going to end the poll, share the results, but primarily it's estimators and then a mix of both. About sixteen percent said that and then six percent you must have a procurement team and you're doing that. And there were some others. I'm just curious if you guys can, if it's other, can you drop it in the chat? We'd love to know who's helping you do that. All right, okay. We will move on. So just to recap what you just saw from Paul with the materials dashboard, It's going to show you materials that are driving cost and help the team prioritize negotiation and substitutions. And the benefits are just get better deals on what matters most and improve that bid competitiveness. And now we're going to jump on into Code Books dashboard. So hand it back over to you Paul. Alright. Let's hop back in. I'm showing a blank screen. There we go. Can I get a thumbs up from either Kyle and Melissa? That's working. Awesome. Alright. So we are back on the home page here of HeavyBid reconstruction, and we're going to be looking at the Codebooks dashboard. This is a very handy tool for anybody that has been using, HeavyBid for a while, or has imported data that may not be quite as new, anybody that's had time basically for, a little bit of, extra data to work its way into your dashboards. So in order to get there, first, we're going to go up to the top to estimate insights. And now instead of clicking on one of the estimates like we've been doing in the past, we're instead going to go on the left to the code book's dashboard. Important thing to call out here, if you have more than one heavy bit division mapped to the same business unit within Precon, you might have multiple options. Mine are all called manager. But these are going to be the different divisions within HeavyBid that you're looking at. So this will control essentially which or sorry, which codebook, you're looking at. So here, I'm in the one that I want. I have my included estimates, which are from the majority of this year. And then we have three different options at the top, and we'll we'll go through these in order. So the first one that it's defaulting to is unused. This is going to be a list of different codes in your codebook that have existed in there but have not been used recently. So these are things that are just sitting in your codebook, but they are not making their way into estimates. And what this means is that maybe you put it in a long time ago, but it's no longer used either because, the code book got updated. Say, for instance, TxDOT just updated their codes, in twenty twenty four. So maybe this is something that you're using from the twenty fourteen book, and you're no longer doing any work that would require those. Or maybe it's even older. Maybe this is from nineteen ninety seven or something like that. So these are things that are taking up space and that could cause estimators to accidentally choose the wrong one here. We want to reduce that. We want your your codebooks to be accurate and to be useful. So in this unused section, it's going to show us what the code is. It's going to show us the description of it, the level, so how many how many tie like, how many times you have to go down in order to get it. So level two is under level one. And the last time it was updated. You can see here, I have things that were updated in two thousand one, two thousand and two. These are probably not useful anymore. If they were useful, they would be getting used in my actual estimates. So this is a great place for us to be able to start. We can still filter down. So if I'm looking at, specific filters that I want to add, I can add those in, just like we've seen previously. But I can kinda go through and see, are these still useful? If they are not, it's a great time to hop into, codebooks within HeavyBid and delete these from there. If they're not being used anymore, let's not have them in there because I don't want somebody accidentally choosing the wrong one. This happens especially often if you have the same codes that are very similar to each other and you have essentially an updated version and an outdated version. You don't want somebody to get the wrong fifty-fifty, especially if you're making changes last minute. You're doing two thousand words a minute on there, changing all the numbers, everything. It's very easy to accidentally miss a key, and we don't want that missed key, keystroke to end up showing the wrong information. So this is, just essentially a very long list of all the different codes, their descriptions, and the last time they were updated so that you can make the determination should these still be in here. And if they should not, you can remove them. Paul, we have a few questions that came through. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so one is, do you have to have the latest twenty twenty five HeavyBid update to see many of the items in preconstruction? No, you do not. You will need to sync these. So if you have not set your HeavyBid desktop to sync to HeavyBid Preconstruction, this will not show up, but that is not dependent on you being on the latest version. Also, a quick reminder that there is a difference between syncing your system settings and your codebooks and that sort of thing versus syncing estimates, which is what we were looking at earlier. If you have any questions on why something may not be showing up right or if you have any questions on is this set up properly, I'd encourage you to reach out to support. Kyle may be answering you or somebody else from our support team. We'll be happy to take a look at it with you and make sure that everything is set up correctly to have this working for you. Great. Thank you, Paul. And we have one more question that came through. The code book dashboard feature is only available to companies with full features access. How do we get full feature access? There are two different ways to do that. The first is, again, you can reach out to support, and they can walk you through the process. That's gonna be a default answer to everything. Our support staff is amazing. The other way that you can do it is contact your company's system administrator, and they can actually make that upgrade themselves through HCSS credentials. They're able to go in and change from the limited subscription that is currently available that it sounds like you're probably on up to the paid full version, and they can have that start automatically. So you can either self serve or you can contact, either support or our customer success team, and they're happy to walk you through it and make sure that you you fully understand everything there. Awesome. Thank you. Are there any other Sorry. If there are more questions, then, we'll put them at the end. I have two other reports that I want to go through here for everybody, and I'm happy to swap back between them. So if you do have a question, feel free to throw it in. I'm happy to come back to the unused section. Our next report in this list, if I just click on the Unuse button, I can go to Missing. So these are activities that are being used in estimates that do not exist in my code book. So these are things that used, are needed, but do not exist. And so it's going to be a very similar layout from before. I can see the activity code here. I can see the description for it, the units, and the bid item. And then I can also see what estimate is this being used in. It's possible. I have one estimate that is just throwing off everything, and I don't want to add all of the stuff from that one off estimate to my codebooks. But here I can see I actually have a decent smattering of different there's a lot of One Earth in there, but I have a couple of others in there as well that an activity code got used inside of my estimate, but it did not exist in my activity code book. So this is a great way for us to just double check and make sure that people aren't having to manually type this in over and over. If I see a very similar activity getting used multiple times here, that's that's a really good indication to me that I should probably add that into the code book for two reasons: one, it's way faster. It's already there. They can just pull it, and it goes straight in. And the other is there's less opportunity for error, especially with a lot of the reporting that we've looked at. If I have two activities and they're very similar but maybe they're, one has a typo in its description or even in the code itself, that might show as two separate things when I go to run reports or when I'm making comparisons, that sort of thing. So this is going to help standardize, and reduce double entry. We want to make this as quick as possible for you and as accurate as possible for you. So it's a very easy way to see what are the different activities that I'm adding in that are not in my code book and double check. If I see a couple on this list, like here, I see three items that are very similar, that's my last report here, and then I'm sure we probably have some more questions. So the last one, again, if I just click on, the button right next to report, I can switch between these three. We've already looked at unused, and we've looked at missing. Now we're going to look at utilized. So these are things that have been changed. An estimator took an item from the code book, put it into the estimate, but then they made some sort of change to it. This could be a change to the units. This could be a change to the description a bunch of different things. So this report is a little bit different in that it's a little bit more interactive. On each of these, I can see the code book code, the description, the level like we talked about earlier, the number of times it was used, and the number of times it was modified. So if I go down here to one of the ones that was used twice and modified twice, that tells me this is something that somebody needs, but it's not set up in the codebooks in a way that fits what they needed. So on this one, I can actually click, and it's going to pop up with a little bit more information about it. So here I can see that this time it was, modified. The units specifically were the part that were modified, and they were modified to MO into month. It also shows the estimate again. So on One Earth and One Pave, this was modified. So if I need more information, I can go into those specific estimates and see exactly where those were, because I can see the bid item they were a part of and which estimate they were a part of. I can also see when it was modified. So I have four modifications. They were all made this year, and I can see that the units were changed in both of these. So that may tell me that in twenty twenty five, I may wanna update the, code book item to also modify that unit into month. If that's what it's constantly constantly being used for, it it's worth looking at to see is that worth changing. And, of course, the same thing happens with all the different ones here. So I can go through and click on each one and see, again, this one had units changed, and I can go back to the full list and go down to each one. So I can go into each one, click this little back arrow, and find the different items that are getting modified. And then I can make the determination, is that something that I want to update in my codebook? Again, this is something that exists in the codebook already, and this is something that is being used in estimates, but it's being used differently than how I have it in the codebook. And so I can go in and make that determination. And if I want to make that change, I can go to my codebooks in desktop and make that change. Have we had I see a whole bunch of, numbers next to the chat. I assume we have some questions here. Okay, Paul. I just asked everyone a question. I was curious how long, how often do they update their code books? So getting some good feedback from customers. And asked if they felt like the dashboard would help you do this faster and getting some responses that, yes, they think it would. So that's good. But you haven't missed anything. Awesome. Okay. That is the how we can use Codebooks dashboard to make sure that our HeavyBid codebooks are up to date and that we're able to make the most out of them. Like I said, the the primary reason that we want to go through and make sure that this is updated is twofold. First, we want to make sure that everything is accurate in there, so that we don't have people constantly changing things. We want our data to be standardized so that we're able to report against it, apples to apples and, use that for our data analysis. And the other is we wanna speed this up. If the the the whole point of creating the codebooks well, not the whole point. A good portion of the point of creating codebooks in the first place, is that we're not having to build everything, one activity at a time. We're not having to type in every single one every single time. We're able to just pull it from this library that we have. So we wanna make sure that that library is accurate, so that we can speed it up and so that we don't have to do double entry. And with that, I will turn it over to Kyle. Actually, Awesome. Sorry, Melissa. If you don't mind, I just wanted to I know we have seven minutes to go. I'm gonna launch a really quick poll for everyone. We just were curious if you do use the code books dashboard. What's your role? So I'm going to launch that really quick. Give us like twenty seconds. If anyone does use it, they can drop in their answers. Okay. Perfect. I know we're a little bit low on time, so while people are filling out the the poll question, Stacy, this should be pretty quick. You were asking about the costs for historical costs and comparing it to today's value. Right now we do not make those calculations. So if it was if you're comparing to an estimate from nineteen ninety five and it was twenty five dollars in nineteen ninety five and you put in twenty five dollars today, obviously the value of those dollars are different, but we will show that that is twenty five to twenty five. We do not make any inflation adjustments or anything like that on our end. All right, thanks for answering the poll. We're going to just move along to syncing and archiving and let Kyle give a brief overview. We've been over this in the last webinar, but just a quick recap of how you do that. And also please remember we have all these videos in the academy which is linked in your resources so you can check out how to do this as well in those videos. All right. Excellent. So good news, we are a little short on time, but the process is simple and easy, so it does not take long to really go through. The initial setup of the estimate history, which is the feature that allows for archiving and estimating, is gonna have to be handled generally by an administrator at the company. We'll need someone who's gonna need credentials, admin access. Our big recommendation for this, just to streamline it, is, as is so frequent, just feel free to give a call to support. We'll walk through the process with you. But a credentials admin will go over to HCSS Credentials. They're gonna navigate on the left side of the screen to the product setup, select HeavyBid, and open the preferences. There's gonna be a plain checkbox. If you haven't used it yet, it'll be empty. All you need to do is check allow access to estimate history in HeavyBid, click save, and we'll actually progress down into the desktop application for the rest of the setup. I think we may have that on the next slide. Yeah. Perfect. So once you're actually in HeavyBid, to finish the setup, you're going to open up an estimate so you can access the tools tab. Go ahead and click into tools, preferences, down into the system drop down. There's gonna be a little plus sign at the bottom of the menu for web applications. You'll click and open that. There's gonna be a section called Estimate Archive slash History. You'll open that preference screen. It's gonna, again, have a little checkbox that says allow archive or allow estimate history. You can go ahead and check that box. There'll be a second option if you want to enable the binoculars to quickly open estimate history for you. You can choose to apply that to yourself, all users, or no one. It's an optional, you know, feature. And then you'll click okay on this screen to save that or navigate over to user credential setup. If y'all are using a sort of the older version of HeavyBid that's not subscription based, this is gonna be where you can set up credentials to actually log in. You will need to use an account that's been created in the HCSS credentials. It doesn't need a HeavyBid license, but it does need to be able to log in to hcssapps.comm. Plug in the username and password, either with the user credentials or system credentials, depending on how much access you want to grant everyone in the system. Click the okay button, and the feature is ready to go from there. So on the next slide here, I believe we actually have what the archive screen looks like. One of the main things we like to recommend archiving for is when you realize the open estimate screen is just starting to get clogged up, you've got estimates from ninety eight because you've never archived an estimate, never had the option, and you just kept them in the heavy bit system, you can go to the file menu. There's gonna be a button that specifically says archive. You click into that, and then you'll have a window that's gonna show you all the archived estimates currently in the archive system, as well as a button in the bottom right of that window to allow you to archive new estimates. Archiving will be as simple as checking the box and pressing archive to begin the process. It may prompt you for a password. That's gonna be your HeavyBid administrator password. Again, archiving does bring them up into preconstruction. For the estimate insight side, you'll see them in the archive section. These are gonna be usually older estimates that you just want for historical data. Melissa, I think on the next slide, we may have one for sinking estimates. Perfect. Syncing estimates is going to be more for estimates that you're actively working. You wanna have them in sync with the projects up in preconstruction so you can actively analyze them with insights or push any KPIs up to that dashboard for easier analysis. This is gonna be a similar process that utilizes estimate history. If you want to automate syncing within an estimate itself, you can click on tools, go into the estimate preferences, and then into the bid summary and pricing section, there's gonna be a checkbox at the very bottom of this window that says automatically sync Estimate Data. Go ahead, click Okay on this, and every time you run Bid Summary to a max of once per half hour, we don't wanna just spam the sync process. But when you run Bid Summary for that estimate, or when you close the estimate, it's going to sync automatically to preconstruction and update that data for you so that you don't have to manually click on file, sync, and upload those estimates for the first time. So we are at time but the key benefits, thank you so much for that Kyle, was really great to recap. We'll send all of this an email after. The benefits to keep your data organized and accessible for insights. If you're not using insights already please check out the academy or you can call support they can hook everything up for you walk you through it. You might be chatting with Kyle when you call support and they can also help you get estimate insights running and please feel free to leave if anyone has any last minute questions, happy to, if you want to drop it in the chat, we can email you after this webinar and get back to you in person. But thank you all so much for joining. We appreciate it and please come back for the next before the bid webinar which will happen in September. So, Alright. Thank you, guys.