Start with your review process
Your trade, your document package, your checklist. Establish the supported scope before relying on the output.
Before it reaches
your estimate.
Read the bid documents together. Check where the plan, the schedule and the scope still leave you a decision.
Plan / schedule / scope
01 / Read it in contextSource → decision
Construction documents, read together.Keep reading ↓
01 / The documents, side by side
A quantity cannot settle
an open scope question.
02 / What a useful walkthrough establishes
Start with your process.
Inspect the first pass.
Open the evidence
Compare the first pass with your own review, including what was missed or could not be checked.
Keep the final bid yours
Confirm the actual handoff into your estimate. Interpretation, pricing and approval stay with your team.
03 / Where the review time goes
The questions already
inside the set.
Explore the review problems this page is built around.
01The plan says one thing. The schedule says another.
The plan and the schedule can leave two readings for the same item. Put both source locations together so the estimator can raise the question before choosing a basis for the bid.
02Which document governs? Check this project’s requirements.
Check the project’s actual order-of-precedence and clarification requirements. A comparison can show where documents differ; it does not decide which document governs your contract.
03The question appears late. Find the clarification deadline early.
Check the bid package’s clarification process and deadline. Surface an unresolved item while there is still a route to ask, and record the basis used if an answer is not available.
04By others. Two words that move your scope.
Check the drawings, specifications, responsibility notes and scope letter together. Where responsibility remains unclear, name the question and its owner before relying on an inclusion or exclusion.
05Two bid totals can carry different scope.
Inclusions, exclusions and qualifications change what two bids cover. Make those differences visible so a comparison can account for the scope behind the number.
06You cannot price the walls until you have priced the ceilings.
How high you board and finish a wall depends on the ceiling above it, so the ceiling take-off has to come first, off a different sheet. Half the quantities in a package are locked behind a quantity that lives somewhere else in it.
07Addendum three lands Thursday. You took that sheet off on Monday.
A sketch changes the exact sheet you already measured. And underneath that sits the older trap, which is being handed a stale set to bid and then held to the current one. It is why a careful bid names the drawing date and lists every addendum it actually used.
08The scope is all there. It is just not in one place.
Some on the drawings, some in the spec book, some in the addenda. And the parts that cost the most are the least visible. Whether a wall is rated, how many layers it takes, whether it runs all the way to the deck. None of that is on the plan. It is in a detail.
09Every office draws differently. Nobody teaches you theirs.
The graphic language gets picked up by osmosis and everybody assumes you already have it. So the first hours on an unfamiliar package go to working out how this firm says things, before a single quantity is measured. Nobody pays for those hours and they recur with every new relationship.
10Performance specified. Who is responsible for the design?
If a requirement describes performance rather than a complete design, check the named design responsibilities, required submittals and acceptance process before carrying it into your scope.
Your set. Your review.
Know what you are
carrying into the bid.
Choose a project you already know and the checklist your team already uses. Agree on the supported scope before sharing files. Compare what the first pass caught, what it missed and what still needed you.
Discuss your workflowAI supports the first pass. Human review remains required.