After the invitation is already yours
A lot of software that says “bid/no-bid” is written for the general contractor: a pipeline of invitations, a heat map of coverage, a PDF of which trades have priced. That is not this page.
On a mechanical, electrical, plumbing, roofing, or steel desk the invitation is already in the mailbox. BuildingConnected, PlanHub, Dodge, ConstructConnect, and SmartBid are how it got there. They are invite sources. They connect. They are not the decision. The decision is whether your crew, bonding, and history make this pursuit worth the hours it will consume.
That decision is worthless if it happens before the set is read. The invitation email is a marketing document. The clauses that disqualify you, the liquidated damages that change the number, and the addendum that moved the close live in the documents. Bid/no-bid in ArosBid sits after document review for that reason.
What the card is allowed to use
ITB fit is whether the scope, sector, and delivery method match work you actually win. Bond requirement is whether the bid bond and the performance bond sit inside capacity you have, not capacity you remember having last year. Addenda complete is whether the inbound log is current before you spend takeoff hours on a superseded set. Exclusions are the ones you already know you will carry, written down so they are not rediscovered at proposal time. Crew capacity is your own calendar, not a national labor headline.
Each line is a score you can disagree with. A green badge is not a command. An amber bond line is a review item. The shape of the card is the claim: criteria, evidence, a recommendation, and a human gate.
History has to exist to be used
Scoring against “GC history” is a slogan unless the last pursuit kept its identity from invite through award or loss. Most desks file the bid as a folder and the award as a line in accounting, weeks later, under a different job name. The hallway version of history is then the only version that loads in time.
ArosBid keeps the pursuit identity intact so the next bid/no-bid can use it. How often this GC invites versus awards. How far off the winner you were on comparable work. Which exclusions you carried last time and whether they held. That is bookkeeping, not analytics. The scorecard is a by-product of the record being complete. See the ratio almost nobody tracks for why the number usually never gets built.
Eligibility is a go/no-go input
Mandatory site visits, registration deadlines, prequalification, and bonding thresholds live in the front end. Miss one and the estimate was spent on a bid that will not be opened. Those findings belong on the scorecard before anyone starts a takeoff, not in a post-mortem that never happens because there is nothing to review.
The supporting essay is The line that disqualifies the bid. The inbound log for later changes is Missed addenda. This page does not retell those essays. It is the decision that uses them.
The estimator still makes the call
A score of 78 is not a bid. A score of 55 on crew capacity is not a refusal. Judgement about whether this GC honours an allowance, whether the schedule is fiction, and whether the office can absorb another close on the same Thursday is exactly the thing a twenty-year estimator was hired to do. The product’s job is to put the cited facts on one card so that judgement is not spent hunting for them.
During training, nothing about this decision becomes an outbound action without a recorded approval. Isolated instance. Microsoft Entra ID. Money elsewhere in the cycle is still integer-cent code. Takeoff and estimate are in the product and replace Trimble AutoBid. Bid/no-bid is why you might not start those hours at all.
