The typical HeavyBid customer is an infrastructure contractor who builds highways, bridges, dams, tunnels, airports, railroads, utilities, pipelines, or wastewater treatment plants. These contractors use crews and heavy equipment and typically do unit price work, such as DOT work or non-typical large facilities like stadiums and power plants. Those wanting to standardize their vertical and horizontal construction divisions, or job owners and engineering firms needing to make capital budget estimates may also use HeavyBid.

HeavyBid implementation costs $3,400/day at your site and is led by professional estimators with more than 20 years of experience. This cost includes our travel and training expenses. Training typical requires two to four days at your office.

Yes. You can add to or modify a copy of the original estimate, or you can create a change order estimate.

HeavyBid comes in three different levels to fit companies of all sizes, from small contractors typically bidding projects worth $100,000 up to large contractors with an annual revenue of $100 Million or more.

All software upgrades and support are included with the cost of your software purchase for the first year. After that, HCSS charges a minimal maintenance fee to continue access to technical support and upgrades.

HeavyBid provides interfaces to more than 30 accounting systems at no charge, including Viewpoint, Dexter & Chaney, Sage 300 (Timberline, QuickBooks, Foundations, and other popular accounting software programs. Some interfaces require custom programming at an additional charge – including JD Edwards, SAP, and CMIC – as there are no standard interfaces with these programs.

HeavyBid Basic starts at $6,900 per license, for companies with a revenue of $10 Million or less. HeavyBid Advanced, for companies with a revenue of $10 Million to $100 Million per year, starts at $9,200 per year. Comprehensive licenses, for companies with revenue of more than $100 Million per year, start at $11,700 per license. HCSS offers volume discounts starting with the second license purchased.

After the first year, HCSS charges an annual maintenance fee that ranges from 15 to 20 percent of the purchase price of your software. This fee gives your company access to 24/7/365 support and any software updates and new releases.

HeavyBid’s activity codes map to project management codes in Microsoft Project and Primavera P3, P5, and P6. HeavyBid then exports activities and durations, along with resources, to the project management software. The new schedules and durations can be imported back into HeavyBid, which can then be studied to see what has to be done to the estimate to achieve the new schedules.

If your company only does simple estimates that take a few hours of time each month, HeavyBid might be overkill. Typically, HeavyBid’s cost averages out to less than $2,500 per estimator per year over a six-year period, but it improves estimator productivity by 25 percent or more and includes award-winning customer support that is available 24/7/365.

If you choose not to pay maintenance, you will still have access to your software and all of your estimates and data. However, you will not receive updates or access to our 24/7/365 instant customer support.

HeavyBid’s coding system makes it easier to standardize across your company and to store data, like costs, against those codes, as well as to group data by codes or code group. A flexible coding structure also allows individual estimators or company divisions to have some latitude within the general framework to customize for their specialized way of estimating. With HCSS HeavyJob, a consistent coding structure will allow you to look at actual job data while building your estimate.

Currently, HeavyBid is only sold as concurrent user perpetual licenses with annual maintenance. You pay for the license up front, and then pay maintenance each year for access to updates and our 24/7/365 in-house customer support.

HeavyBid is a multi-user software system that eliminates the formula errors and version issues of spreadsheets. HeavyBid allows you to build well-documented estimates that will be accessible as long as you need them, and it allows you to build complicated estimates with ease. In addition, HeavyBid provides you with instant 24/7 customer support for your last-minute bids and complicated estimates.

Yes. HCSS has had Users Group Meetings every year since 1989. We currently host two meetings each year, in January and February, with more than 1,500 users in attendance – more than half of them estimators. At HCSS Users Group Meetings, you will learn from both HCSS and other customers on how to improve your estimating, suggest additions or changes to the improve the software, and learn about other products to improve your productivity.

At HCSS, we believe in our products. You bought our software to improve productivity, and we expect HeavyBid to help you achieve that. We also expect you to be delighted with our software and support.

Communication between the field and the office is the key to an efficient, profitable company. HeavyBid provides your estimators’ productions, notes, crews, and calculations to HeavyJob field management software to help your foremen and project managers follow the budget and build as closely to the estimate as possible. Field production data is also sent back to HeavyBid to improve estimating accuracy.

No. HeavyBid has been used to build joint ventures worth more than $1 Billion, and it is not uncommon to have 500 to 1,000 bid items in a unit price bid. In fact, we’ve seen estimates with more than 10,000 resources built in HeavyBid.

Our HeavyBid users tell us they are able to double their estimating output compared to spreadsheets and improve estimating time and effort by 25 to 50 percent compared to other estimating software systems, allowing you to afford an additional estimator or get an additional $25,000 worth of projects bid per estimator for less than $2,500 per year. That estimate quality will improve as you spend more time analyzing your estimates with HeavyBid.

Yes. Even if you have a network, HCSS recommends having HeavyBid on standalone laptops as a backup in case of network or internet failure near bid time.

Estimate entry into HeavyBid is typically nearly instant, regardless of estimate size, and reports very rarely take more than one minute to produce. Major changes in large estimates may take a minute or so, but the bid summary process (summarizing the bid and running cost-spreading routines to arrive at unit prices) might take 7 or 8 minutes on an estimate with thousands of resources.

Yes. HCSS is proud of our 24/7/365 instant support based at our Sugar Land, Texas, campus. You can expect support from a qualified technician in three rings or less, and expect that our staff will bend over backwards to help you get your bid in on time.

Yes. A huge percentage of our customers do DOT work. In fact, HeavyBid can download biditems from most states’ DOTs and write prices back to their DOT applications.

If you purchase a HeavyBid Enterprise license, then each division of your company can have its own code libraries, and you will still be able to pool the concurrent user count across your enterprise.

Yes. We are proud of our references. Thousands are available here

Maybe. HeavyBid works saves the most time for companies whose estimates include a lot of resources, alternate construction methods, and a lot of thinking and analysis required to make a competitive bid. While HeavyBid works for any kind of estimating, but for estimates consisting of material takeoffs with a standard material price and labor factor, there may be more appropriate estimating software for your company.

HCSS does have a number of construction customers with both infrastructure and vertical construction divisions, so if you are looking to standardize both groups on the same software, HeavyBid works much better for vertical construction than vertical software does for infrastructure construction.

Yes. With HCSS Cloud, HCSS takes care of system hardware, backups, and updates while giving you completely secure data and 99.9 percent uptime. Your users will have the fastest performance possible, reducing your IT expenses and overhead.

Yes. More than 50,000 estimators in the United States and Canada currently use HeavyBid.

Yes. Several cities, engineering firms, and public utilities use HeavyBid for that purpose. We also interface with RSMeans and Richardson’s pricing data.

A typical implementation includes two to four days of training at your office with one of our professional estimators with more than 20 years of experience. HeavyBid Basic usually requires two days of training. HeavyBid Advanced usually requires three days of training, and Comprehensive usually requires four days. Implementation for multi-divisional companies may take longer.

Yes. In fact, that is one major benefit of HeavyBid. For example, we have had joint ventures estimated from multiple locations with as many as 25 estimators working on the same bid, many at the same time.