For commercial electrical estimators
See the building. Skip the chase.
Gear quotes, re-keys the pricing, watches the addenda, and keeps the bid log — Mission diagnoses the operating constraint before prescribing the build.
Your day
The judgment is the job. The busywork just surrounds it.
You juggle several live bids at different stages — one mid-takeoff, one waiting on lighting and gear quotes, one due at 2 with an addendum that just dropped. Seeing the building in a set of plans and setting the final number is where the money is made. The chasing, re-keying, and reconciling around it is what drains the desk.
- The judgment
- Reading the drawings and specs to see what’s really being asked, catching scope buried in the general notes, choosing and adjusting labor units for this crew and these conditions, making build-vs-sub calls, and setting the final number — the part only you can do.
- The administrative tax
- Soliciting and chasing distributor quotes, re-keying PDF pricing into Accubid or McCormick line by line, reconciling late addenda against an existing takeoff, formatting the proposal for each GC’s portal, logging every bid into a tracking spreadsheet, and following up after submission.
What it costs
Admin caps how many bids you can land.
You’re the revenue engine — no bid, no backlog — and the single biggest risk surface, where one fat-fingered labor unit is committed for the life of the job. With several bids due the same week, the busywork is the binding constraint on how many quality numbers go out, and one missed step turns a win into a loss.
Half the bid goes to counting
Vendors put manual takeoff and the counting around it at as much as half of every bid cycle — directional, but it’s a large share of your hours that’s rules-based busywork.
Late addenda blow up the takeoff
A commercial bid draws three to five addenda, and roughly 60% of them land in the final week — each one forcing a re-check and sometimes a full re-takeoff hours before the deadline.
The bid log never teaches back
Fewer than six percent of firms track their hit rate, so most estimating spend flies blind — chasing the wrong GCs and project types because the bid log never gets kept current.
Directional patterns from the trade and from operator interviews — not Mission results. Your numbers get established in the assessment.
Where the constraint often shows up
It handles chasing, re-keying, and reconciling. You keep the number.
You assign the workflow once. Mission’s agent works the distributor inbox, stages the pricing, watches the portals, and keeps the bid log — while every takeoff, labor-unit, and final-number call stays with you.
- Solicits and chases vendor quotes
Emails RFQs to your distributor list from the bill of materials, tracks who has and hasn’t responded, sends follow-ups as bid day approaches, and surfaces a clean comparison — so you stop babysitting an inbox waiting on a gear quote.
- Extracts and stages vendor pricing
Reads incoming quote PDFs and emails, parses line items and lead times into a structured comparison ready for your review — killing the manual re-key into Accubid or McCormick, with you confirming before anything enters the estimate.
- Watches portals and flags addenda
Monitors BuildingConnected, iSqFt, and Procore plus email for new addenda and revised drawings, alerts you immediately, and highlights what changed against the prior set — so re-takeoff starts from a clean delta, not a blind re-read.
- Keeps the bid log and assembles proposals
Maintains the tracker — due dates, GC contacts, status, outcome — and computes hit rate by GC and project type, then drafts the proposal in each GC’s format with exclusions and addenda acknowledgments and runs the post-bid follow-up.
The result
More accurate bids out the door. None of the extra nights.
When chasing, re-keying, and reconciling run on their own, the busywork stops capping your throughput — and your judgment reaches every bid you should be pricing instead of only the ones you have time to file.
You’re the chaser, the typist, and the bid log.
- The gear quote lands at 11 for a 2 o’clock bid.
- Distributor pricing gets hand-typed into the estimate, line by line.
- An addendum drops the day before and half the lighting gets re-taken-off.
You read the plans and set the number. The rest is moving.
- The chasing runs itself; only late or missing quotes reach you.
- Pricing arrives staged and structured, ready for you to accept.
- The addendum delta is flagged the moment it posts, not on bid day.
Safe by default
It gathers and drafts — it never commits a number you didn’t.
On a binding bid, a transcribed-wrong price or a scope gap missed in a late addendum goes straight to margin for the life of the job. Mission is built so the agent does the chasing, the re-keying, and the formatting and proposes the rest — the takeoff, the labor units, and the final number stay yours to approve.
- Connected
- Works inside the tools you already run on — email, calendars, sheets, your CRM, your portals.
- Approved
- Anything risky or off-mission is held for your sign-off before it touches data or goes out the door.
- On mission
- You set the assignment once. The work stays on it for days and weeks without drifting.
- Observable
- You always have a clear view of what ran, what changed, and what needs a call — no transcript spelunking.
Set the number. Skip the chasing.
Tell us the bids that route through you every week, and we’ll show you the quote chasing, re-keying, and addenda watch Mission would carry.
Not ready to talk? Map one workflow yourself — free, no sign-up, and the first three steps put a dollar figure on it.