KEYBID

The Manual

Everything in Keybid, in plain contractor language. Ten minutes to read; a bid department for life.

Start here — 60 seconds

1Create your account. Top right → Create account. Company name, trade, email, password. Your board is private to your company — nobody else can ever see your bids, your numbers, or your win rate. (No account yet? Play with the demo — it's the fictional Blue Mesa Sitework, reset anytime.)
2Set your targets. Settings → weekly bid target, 90-day backlog goal, and your follow-up cadence (default 5, 12, 21 days after submitting). These three numbers drive everything the agents nag you about.
3Get your first bid on the board. Three ways: + New Bid (type it), 📧 Paste an ITB (paste the invite email — the Intake Agent parses it into a card), or 📐 Upload plans (drop a plan set PDF).

The Board — your whole bid life on one screen

Six columns, left to right, the way a bid actually moves: Invited → Estimating → Submitted → Awaiting Award → Won → Lost/No-Bid. Click any card to open it: move stages, set the value, log notes and intel. Dollar totals sit at the top of each column — the "Awaiting Award" total is the number to watch.

Every live card carries two smart badges. 🎯 GO 71 is the Triage Agent's go/no-go score — how well this bid fits your trade, size band, and history (hover for the reason). 📊 76% win is your win probability — computed from your own record with that GC, your overall win rate, fit, and how the chase is going. It's an estimate from your data, never a promise — and it gets sharper with every outcome you log.

Log every loss and no-bid honestly. Dead bids are fuel — they're what teaches the win-probability engine and the analytics who your real customers are.

🔗 Link email — the inbox that answers itself

Click 🔗 Link email in the header. Every bid email lands with the reply already drafted: award letters get a "send the contract and bonding requirements" response; addenda get a "confirming our number by Friday"; a GC asking you to hold your price gets held — professionally. You read, then tap ✓ Approve & send, ↻ Redraft, or Skip. You approve every word before anything represents your company.

Real inbox sync is rolling out — today you can also forward any bid email to your Keybid intake address and it appears on the board, parsed and triaged, automatically.

📐 Plans — drop a plan set, get your trade's scope

1Click 📐 Upload plans (header or Plans tab) and pick the PDF — or paste the sheet index and notes into the text box.
2Plan Intelligence reads it and returns: the sheets that touch your trade, the quantities and sections it found (pavement builds, base depths), and the ⚑ flags — prevailing wage, PG76-22 binder, a soils report older than the current site plan, over-excavation, dewatering. The flags are the expensive stuff estimators get burned by.
Scanned (photo) plan sets have no text to read yet — OCR is coming. Paste the sheet index and general notes instead; the flags still work.

Follow-Ups — where bids are actually won

The moment you mark a bid Submitted, the cadence starts. When a follow-up comes due, the Follow-Up Agent has the email already written in your queue — project, GC, days since submission, in a professional voice. Tap ✓ Approve and it's logged (and delivered, once email sending is switched on). The sub who follows up on schedule beats the sub with the better number more often than anyone admits.

This Week & Analytics

This Week is your 7am look: everything due, sorted, red when it's tomorrow. Analytics is the quarterly truth: submitted dollars by month, your win rate by customer (who awards you work vs. who shops your number), and the backlog tracker versus your 90-day goal.

🧠 The Brain — The Foreman

The Foreman is the coded brain supervising everything, around the clock: it checks database integrity, snapshots a backup, watches every deadline (and nags exactly once), keeps every due follow-up drafted overnight, monitors attack traffic, and reviews every agent's health. Open the Brain tab to see its duty roster and a log of every decision it makes. It supervises; it never invents a number.

Your data, your security

One click — ⬇ Download all my data on the Brain tab — exports everything you've ever put in as a file you keep. Your data is never trapped and never shared: not with other contractors, not with GCs, not with anyone. Sentinel, the security watchdog, screens every request for attack signatures and auto-blocks repeat offenders. The fine print lives at Terms and Privacy.

Quick answers

Does the AI make up numbers? No. Every statistic is computed from your data with plain math; the AI only writes words — and you approve every word. · What trades does it work for? All of them — your trade setting drives triage scoring and which plan sheets are "yours." · Can my whole team use it? One login per company today; team seats are coming. · What does it cost? Free during beta. · I found a bug / want a feature: tell us — beta partners steer the roadmap.

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