3 Reasons to Add Instant Calculations to Your Construction Bid Templates

Improve your construction bid templates with instant Calculations

As the construction industry embraces the many advantages of digital solutions, it is critical that your operation keeps pace. One area often jeopardized by outdated business tools (like paper forms) is the bidding process. Relying on pen and paper to complete construction bids, estimates, and proposals often results in data entry errors, spelling mistakes, illegible documents, and a variety of other issues that can slow, disrupt, or impede the bidding process. Digital form platforms, like GoFormz, provide a simple solution to the manual data entry process. With digital forms, your construction bid templates can easily be equipped with powerful fields and features to help accelerate and refine the data entry process. 

One of the more powerful features that can be leveraged within your digital construction bid templates is instant Calculations, which can be easily added to your form fields to automatically calculate totals, taxes, and more. For example, Automatic Calculations could be added to the ‘Cost’ column of a Labor & Materials Table field, and used to sum the total cost of labor and materials estimated for a job, and could even include taxes, discounts, and more.  

1. Strike while the iron is hot – with instant Calculations, bid estimates can be completed from a client’s location, eliminating return trips to the office
   When a prospective client asks you for an estimate, needing to return to the back-office to complete calculations results in unnecessary delays that can jeopardize your bid. Automatic Calculations allow your team to enter figures into their digital forms and instantly generate a total – accelerating form completion and customer communication, without sacrificing accuracy. 

2. Reduce human error – automatic Calculations can complete totals, incorporate tax rates, deduct discounts, and more while remaining highly accurate
   Let’s face it, we can’t all be good at math. For this reason, among the more common issues associated with manual mathematics are miscalculations. Issues with your bid’s totals can lead to detrimental miscommunications, customer frustration, and paperwork delays. Leveraging instant Calculations within your digital construction bid templates can help your team completely avoid the need for manual math, and provide highly accurate totals faster. 

3. Improve data integrity – more accurate calculations protect the integrity of your data collection, ensuring only the most accurate information is submitted
   Finally, calculations included within your digital construction forms eventually reach your data collection, meaning miscalculations can risk the integrity of your database. Digital forms can help ‘sanitize’ incoming data, ensuring information is highly accurate before it reaches your database, systems of record, and more.

How GoFormz customers are winning with instant Calculations

Oscar W. Larson, which provides contracting solutions to a variety of industries, perform energy audits at their customer sites. These audits require Oscar Larson’s sales representatives to complete a document detailing the kilowatt and cost savings of replacing light bulbs and using alternative sources of energy. When relying on paper forms, sales reps would need to return to the office to run calculations, print the proposal for signing, and return to the customer location — all before securing a sale. This process was time-consuming and jeopardized sales opportunities. 

With digital forms, calculations can be instantly run once figures have been added to the document, requiring no manual math or return trips to the office. The finalized document can even be signed by the customer directly from the device – accelerating approvals and allowing Oscar Larson representatives to secure sales more effectively. Read the full case study here >

To learn more about how digital forms can improve your construction operation, check out our customer case studies, explore our Procore integration, or request a demo of the GoFormz platform today.