HeavyBid Webinar April 2026

All right. Okay. Well, hey, everyone. Thank you for joining our monthly HeavyBid customer webinar. Today's a big day. It's officially HCSS product release day. So we've moved to a seasonal release model so that every product across the HCSS platform launches new features and enhancements on the same day. So this means just four times a year, you can look forward to a synchronized update across your entire HCSS suite. So today though, we're gonna be diving into what's new for HeavyBid preconstruction and HeavyBid. But before we jump in, I wanted to kick things off with some introductions. So I'll go first. My name is Melissa Teague and I'm the product marketing manager for HeavyBid. And so what I do is spend a lot of time trying to understand your day to day and challenges you face, and then identify what we need to create for you all, what's the right materials, training videos, blog posts, whatever it is that will help you get the most out of our products. And then I'll kick it over to Aaron. Alright. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Aaron Allshouse. I'm the TPM for both HeavyBid and and or HeavyBid Desktop and HeavyBid. You know? I've probably spoken to to the vast majority of y'all at some point or another, but I've been here for just shy of thirteen years at this point, and I can look forward to continue working with y'all in the years ahead. Hey, everyone. My name is Paul Lambert. I'm the TPM for the quotes module as well as proposals within HeavyBid, and I believe I've probably seen most of you as well here. If you end up having any questions, you can always reach out to any of us. And hello, everyone. My name is Erika Vincent, and I am TPM for preconstruction, our project tracking application. And I've been with the company a little bit over a year, and everything that comes to project tracking and road mapping, making sure we are improving project tracking, and we're listening to the users, what you wanna see, how your workflows are going are all coming to me. So always feel free to share your, feedback. And today, we will be showing what we have, done this quarter. So exciting. Back to you, Melissa. Great. Thanks, Erika. And so today, like we mentioned, we're going to first go into the preconstruction new releases, then the HeavyBid new releases, and then Q and A at the end. So for this spring twenty twenty six release, the key things you're gonna see first starting with preconstruction, Erika is gonna show you guys the import export company codes and so how that's gonna help with bulk edits and so on. And then Aaron and Paul is gonna talk about what's new in the web based HeavyBid. So we now have an integration with HeavyJob. You can now copy from previous estimates. We have a new AI function for AI audit summaries. We have an improved quotes dashboard, and now you can do quote folder attachments, and we have a few other minor improvements as well that we wanna share with you guys today. So I will now kick it over to Erika for the preconstruction release. Awesome. Thank you, Melissa. So as Melissa mentioned earlier—oh, did the slides go away? Oh, in preconstruction, we have released a import and export feature in the contact management where you can import a code of your company, not before, you, the system would choose what the code would look like. It'll generate from the, first, eight initials of the company name. Well, now when you are importing, you don't have to do that. The system doesn't have to do that for you. You can choose what you want your company code to be. So let me share my screen and walk you through the steps of how you can do that. Let me make sure everything is looking good. Can everyone see? Okay. So project tracking. As you go into contact management, we have on the left side import contacts. This is where you would drag and drop your file. I will do that. I will grab one of my files. I will drag and drop it. So this is my selected file, my sheet. And then if you currently have, you can choose if you have companies, same companies, you can either skip or overwrite. If you skip, the record is not touched. If you overwrite, then whatever information you're importing will be overwritten with what currently exists. And you would map your columns. So company code, this is a required field. You would make note which column does contain company code in your Excel. As you can see, I already mapped them before because I've done this import many times. So once you do it once, you map it once, then the system remembers. I will scroll down. The office nickname is required since I have that in my system entered. And then if you scroll down, you can see in the preview all of my company code now can be imported. So in my Excel document, I had the same information, columns a, b, c, d. I mapped them out. And now I can see that, oh, great. My company code will be imported. And then I will just click import and it will import. Since I already have all this information, I am gonna skip, click import, and it will validate. But since all of these companies were there, nothing was overwritten. But from now on, if I go to company contacts, I click on one of my companies, and then I'll edit. And you can see that the company code, this was the old company code. It was added in there. But if I had a new company code, it would be overwritten, the one that I entered. And that's the latest news that we're releasing in preconstruction. So, thank you so much. If you have any questions, please do ask now or you can always ask in the chat. Let's check if there's anything in the chat. I don't see anything. Yeah. Well, if you ever have any questions, feel free to ask them here or in the email. Erika. Thanks, Erika. Alright. Now we're gonna kick it off with those new web based HeavyBid releases. All right, so I'm gonna steal the screen here, bear with me just a moment. And we're gonna kick things off with a bang here. So let's see, can everybody actually see—okay, so no screen sharing. Perfect. Okay. We're gonna kick things off with a handoff to HeavyJob. In HeavyBid, the big reason for calling it handoff to HeavyJob instead of export to HeavyJob is we're no longer doing any kind of XML file generation and sending data between the two programs. We are writing directly into the HeavyJob system. Seeing as how they're both web based now, there's no reason why we simply can't take the data from HeavyBid and create the job directly in HeavyJob. So in the conform screen, you'll notice we now have the HeavyJobCode column. Borrowing straight from desktop, we can use our copy options here. And in this case, I'm just gonna use my activity code and I'm gonna fill in my HeavyJob code column. We're gonna auto fill it. So now that I have my cost codes ready to go, I can come in here and I can preview what's gonna be sent over. So under the preview, we're gonna have a nice little toggle down here for accounting and HeavyJob. When I select HeavyJob, it's nothing different than your standard preview in HeavyBid desktop just with a lot more data. Instead of just totals, we're giving you all of your different breakdowns, where all the costs are in your particular estimate. I can review that information, make sure everything looks good. At this stage, I'm ready to come over here and click my hand off to HeavyJob. Now you do not—this does not require explicit permissions into HeavyJob in order to generate the job. There is another set of permissions within HeavyBid that will allow an end user to create that job in HeavyJob. But what we're doing is we're essentially mimicking the new job screen from HeavyJob. So if you have HeavyJob, this should look extremely similar. Code and description pull directly from the estimate. The rate sets are coming from the HeavyJob rate set. So these are your labor rate sets and your equipment rate sets pulling directly from HeavyJob. You can adjust that at any given time if you want to. And our address is pulling from the precon project. So we again, we can make modifications here if we choose to, or we can simply come over here and click create job. At this point, you get a nice little spinning indicator letting you know that we're thinking about it. Now the job's created. If you want to and you have permission to view the job in HeavyJob, you can click view job. It's going to open up HeavyJob for you and navigate you directly into that job. So now I have that job built right into HeavyJob. I can view my cost codes. I can view my pay items. I can see all of my information. And now I'm ready to go out and start putting time against that job. The other piece of the puzzle that we are accommodating that we have never traditionally done is after the job is created, there's no link between the bid and the job. We now have a live link. So when you go to that conform screen, you are always going to be presented with a notification of when that job was handed off to HeavyJob. So you get a date, time stamp, and a live link. So if you have permissions in the HeavyJob, you can click the View Job and navigate directly into it. All right. Any questions on the handoff to HeavyJob? All right, not seeing anything come up. So we're going to tackle the next item here and that is our copy previous functionality. So within the build screen, I can right click on any of my items, any pay item, WBS item, activity item, doesn't matter. And I'm going to add from my past estimate. This brings up my copy functionality, and this is what's going to allow me to look into my past estimates. So how do I find data looking at my past estimates? Well, we give you several options here. The first bit is what information am I trying to look at based on, am I looking at it based on a WBS breakdown? Am I looking at it based on a pay item breakdown? Depending on what you choose, the tree is gonna be built out to mimic that. Now if I also want to, I can come in here. If I know what the estimate is, I come in here, I select the estimate. If it's a long list and I don't wanna scroll, I can come in here. Let's see what do I have. Zero one eight. I can key in the estimate or I can key in the description. But the—the real power of this is when I don't remember what the—the estimate was. How do I search by keyword or by code when I'm trying to find something? For instance, if I'm looking for RCP, you know, twenty four inch RCP, I can come in here to my search estimates. And now I have a essentially a keyword or code search. If I know what the code is, I can search for it. Otherwise, I can search RCP. And HeavyBid's going to look at my WBS structure. It's gonna look at my pay items. It's gonna look at my activities and my resources. And it's gonna present you with a list of the items and where they are. So I can see my different activities. I can also see my different resources. If I want to, I'm gonna come in here and find my furnish and install twenty four inches RCP. I'm gonna open it up. It's gonna open up the estimate. I just happen to already be in it, but now I can find my RCP item and select it. So I've got my RCP item. If I just choose the activity, it's going to copy that activity into the pay item that I opened up the copy screen from. However, if I choose to, I can come in here and choose the entire pay item. If I choose the entire pay item, it's going to copy in that whole new pay item. I also have the ability to change the quantity at this stage if I want to. I want it to be five hundred. And now I can save those changes and now I'll have my twenty four inches RCP. Furnish and install twenty four inches RCP. Now I can see all of my information. Let's see what else do we have to talk about today. I got my nifty little cheat sheet over here. Okay, cool. Moving on to our library functionality. Accessing our libraries over here. One of the main things that we added, or we took direct feedback from end users, is finding things in the libraries is difficult or time consuming when I have a long list. It's not surprising to see an activity library with three, four, five thousand items plus. Having to scroll through and find the items you're looking for can be extremely time consuming. So at the top of all of my rate library, so labor, equipment, resources, crews, activities, I now have a search functionality. I can come in here and I can search whatever it is that I want. If I want to search RCP, we'll stick with the RCP theme. I automatically filter it down to my RCP items. And now I can come in here and assign my assembly so I can pick my crews, I can pick my other resources for that particular item. Now, being in the instance of the activities, this is not something that's in the release notes, but it is a small item that since we're here, we might as well share. Coming again from direct feedback is the ability to duplicate an activity. So whenever I want to duplicate an activity, and a great use case of this is if I'm building out my activity library and, you know, for instance, I'm doing my twelve inches, fifteen inches, eighteen inches RCP, I don't want to have to recreate the activity every time. I just want to be able to bring in the same crew, maybe the same production, but just change the material item from twelve inches RCP to fifteen inches RCP. I can select the item I want to copy, and now I get a nifty little duplicate button right at the very top of the screen. I can select it and give it a new code. And what do we have? We'll call it twenty four inches RCP. I'll save it. And now I have my new item. If I had any assemblies attached to it, they would come along as well. And now all I need to do is change that one item versus recreating the whole thing from scratch. All right. Now, our first tackle into AI. What we've done is within the audit trail of HeavyBid, we have given you the ability to give AI audit summaries based on different time periods. What do I mean by that? Well, if anyone's ever had to go through the trouble of actually reading out an audit trail, if this bid's six weeks old, and you've got three, four, five estimators in there, you've got several thousand line items in there. That is extremely tedious to almost impossible to read and understand all of the changes that are taking place, especially if you're not in there on a day to day basis. In the event that I want to go in and just get a summary or a bird's eye view of what changes have taken place over the course of a select period, I now have a nifty little Summarize button right at the very top. I can expand that or I can click the zoom in, out function. And we're going to zoom out to by the hour, and I can see on an hourly basis what changes were made. I can see what estimators made that change. I can see the additive or the deduct value change that was made in that time period, as well as what my estimate total was at the end of that time period. And I can see it by the day. And you'll see here, we're running AI in the background. So as you click it, it's going to build that information. And we can scroll through and we can see it based on the full day. We also give you by the week and by the month if you're working on a very, very long project. The idea here is to save you a lot of time having to comb through your audit trail trying to find one particular change. One of the questions came in is how are permissions handled for libraries in terms of limiting who can edit and add assemblies within the list of activities? That's handled at the the group permissions in credentials. There's line items in there for view and edit the library or for—there's two items in there, one for view libraries and one for to be able to edit libraries. So if they do not have edit access, they cannot go in and make changes to your libraries. All right, and then the next item I want to talk about, and I'm going to jump back into this other estimate here, I'm going to come down, I'm going look at my indirects, and I want to look at my add ons. So a couple small tweaks that we have made for the add ons, again, is based on direct feedback from the end users, is more granularity on what is included in my add on calculation. So historically, we've had entire estimate, we've had this pay item, this activity. Well, entire estimate is wonderful for capturing the entire cost of the estimate. But there are instances where I want to be able to capture all of my estimate costs without any of my previous add ons. So we gave you the ability to calculate it on entire estimate without add ons. We also, while we were in here, added the ability to calculate based on just my direct item, not taking into account any of my indirects. So you'll notice here on my entire estimate, I've got my total of fifty four thousand dollars. As I change it to entire estimate without add ons, and we'll see, well, let's change this to total cost, you'll see the cost actually change. So Entire Estimate, I'm at five thirty nine without add ons. If I move back to Entire Estimate, we're adding the additional cost based on what our other add on was, in this case the forty five thousand. So we're adding that additional cost. So we're just giving you that additional, that granularity into how those dollars are generated. And then last but not least, on the HeavyBid front is, well, wrong button, additional display options within the pricing screen. So one of the things that we had before was just you had your suggested price, you had your entered price, and your proposal item. That's great from a—I want to make my adjustments and submit my bid, but it doesn't tell the whole story of how those dollars came to be. So a couple of the things that we've added is the ability to see quantity, unit, direct cost, indirect cost, our actual markup, our actual markup percent, and be able to choose what gets brought in. So we have it all in the column chooser. You'll see here, I've got direct unit cost, indirect unit cost hidden. I can see all of that information. I can bring in my suggested values and see all of that information. So as well as being able to pin this information. If I want to pin a certain column to my right or my left, that way as I'm scrolling certain values don't change. A great option for that is with my pay item. If I want to, I can have it as no pin. And now when I'm scrolling, my pay item disappears and I can see more of my other columns. But if I want to, I can pin it to my left. And now my pay item is always fixed. And now all I'm going to see is my additional information. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to remove suggested here just for the sake of being able to see more data. And now I can see my additional display columns while without losing my pay item. So I always know what pay item I'm looking at. And I can see what my final entered value is. Now, one other piece of this puzzle that routinely gets brought up in support is if I have a net difference or if I—if I have a cost discrepancy of what's in my pricing screen versus what's in my tree view. Ninety nine times out of one hundred, that's due to rounding. We can come down here and we can run our show calc next to bid total. And there's a column in here for rounding difference. It's going to show you exactly how many dollars are being rounded in that particular item. You can see it's rounding up to the, up and down to the nearest penny multiplied by the quantity. That's going to give you your difference. But now you can see exactly where all of those dollars are coming from in your estimate, giving you full transparency into where all of your dollars are going. Alright. I don't see any questions coming up. So with that being said, Paul, I'm gonna turn it over to you to talk about quotes. Thank you. Give me just a second here to share my screen. Alright. We should be seeing it now. All right. Within the world of quotes, we've made a couple different changes. The first one, this is going to look very different for anybody who's not logged in in a little while. We've switched up the look of it. And the reason for that is we've included some additional information. So here we can see I have three projects. Each of them can be expanded. So if I expand and scroll down, I can see them. But we also have all of our different quote folders in these different statuses. So we have created, in progress, quoted, selected, and done. These currently are fixed statuses. These are ones that you cannot change. They are just the statuses that are available to you. In the future, that may be updated, but you can drag these between the different statuses. So I've created these, but I haven't done anything with them yet. I haven't sent it, sent out solicitations in concrete. But once I have sent out those solicitations, I can go ahead and move that to in progress. In progress, we can see we have eight resources, and on each of these statuses, you have slightly different pieces of information available to you. So here we've selected two of our six vendors, and the total price for those selected vendors is five thousand two hundred and sixty eight dollars. If I want to narrow this down, there's a couple of things I can do. So first, up at the top, I can search. So I can do this by just, like, created, for instance, if I just want to see the created ones on there. But, I can also search by other things. So here I can do concrete, and we'll see for all of them. I have concrete in my created here, in my selected here, and in my created here. So I can search to narrow it down. The other thing that I can do is I can view by status. So right now I'm looking at one project and all the different quote folders for that project sorted by status. The other thing I can do is say, okay, I don't care what the project is. I need to see all of my things that I need to send out solicitations for. Perfect. I go over to status, and this is going to show me here's my six that have been created but are not yet in progress. And for each of them, it will still show you what project it's a part of in this little tag, but this is just another way of viewing that information and seeing, okay, here's where overall, if I'm focusing on one step, here are all the things that need to happen. The other way that you can move things between different statuses besides just dragging and dropping is by going into an individual folder. And up at the top where it says in progress, I can change it that way. So these are all currently something that you will manually choose, either here or by dragging and dropping. In the future, we're looking forward to the statuses changing different things, so potentially kicking off automation workflows for you. One of the other things that we'll notice while we are in this screen is the notes and attachments, area has changed. So previously, it used to be notes on the left hand side, links on the right hand side. Both of those still exist. So in notes here, I can edit and add in my note notes here. And I can still add in links. So if I'm using Google Drive, if I'm using SharePoint, if I'm using any outside cloud provider, I can still add in those links right here. However, we've also added in the attachments section right here. For anybody who's used attachments in other areas, such as precon's old attachments, this is not the same thing. This is a new version of it that has expanded functionality. Precon is currently in the process of doing that as well and will be available in the near future. But if we click add, I can either drag and drop files in or I can click on it and choose a file. So let's do, improved quote dashboard. It will show me all the different files that I'm going to upload, and I can click upload one document here. I can also upload several different files at the same time, but it's going to show them right here. Once I click into this, it's going to give you a preview. So in this case, we're watching a short video. I can click on this little eye icon, and that will show me the details of it. So here I have my file name, and I can change that by clicking this edit button. And it shows me when it was last modified. In our three drop three dot drop down, we have the ability to download that. You can print it. Unfortunately, we haven't invented the ability to print videos. So in this case, it would just be printing a screenshot of it. But if you have a PDF or an Excel file or an image or a Word document, anything like that, can all be printed and delete. The last other important thing on here is the ability to update. If I click update, this allows me to upload a new version of whatever file I've put in there. So if I have, you know, the original scope of the project that I'm working on, and then I get an updated scope from the project manager or sorry, from the project owner, or I need to change something about it, I can just go in here and click and put in my new one. So this, previous one was the improved quote dashboard. This is the quote folder attachments. And click update. And I wanna make sure that this is quote attachments. And you can see we have the improved quote dashboard as the previous, version here. So if I want to, I can go back and I can download previous attachments or previous versions of it, and it will show when they were last modified, and what that version was. So this gives me basic version control. This is another thing that we know there's going to be a lot of requests for additional functionality around version control, but you'll see right now this is still just one document because it's one document that has that has two versions, this most recent version and the old one which I can download. And that's all there is for now. We have some more exciting stuff coming up around attachments and the usability on here, but I don't want to spoil anything. So if anybody is in our beta group, you will be seeing that very soon. And for everybody else, we'll be excited to show that at the the next release.