User manual

What the bid portal does

The site as a whole

The portal publishes Americon bid opportunities and their deadlines, and hands out plan documents to the contractors invited to price them.

The Americon Bid Portal does three jobs, and everything on the site is in service of one of them.

1. It publishes bid opportunities. Every project carries a bid due date, a location, the trades wanted, and the drawings. Public projects appear on the bid calendar for anyone to find. Private projects appear nowhere and are reached only through an invite link.
2. It distributes plan documents. Drawings and bid documents are attached to the project and served through an access-checked endpoint, so a private project's plans cannot be downloaded by someone who was never sent the link.
3. It keeps track of who is bidding. Contractors are asked to identify themselves when they take the plans. That list is what makes it possible to tell everyone when an addendum is issued or a bid date moves.

Two audiences use it, and they use it very differently. Americon staff sign in and manage projects. Contractors never sign in at all — they arrive from an email link, read the project, take the plans, and leave.

Roles and what each one can do

Set per account in User Management

Project Managers and Project Coordinators hold identical permissions. Administrators hold those plus account management and the WordPress admin.

Staff never need the WordPress admin screens. Anyone who is not an administrator is redirected out of /wp-admin and back to the calendar dashboard, and the admin bar is hidden for them.

The help buttons

Beside labels and headings throughout the site

Press any "?" on the site for a short explanation of the control beside it, with a link into the full manual.

Small "?" buttons sit beside the controls that are worth explaining. Press one — with the mouse, with a finger, or by tabbing to it and pressing Enter — and a short explanation appears. Press Escape, or click anywhere else, to dismiss it.

Each one carries a Read more link into the matching entry in this manual, so the popup can stay short.

What the portal does for you

The site as a wholeAmericon staff

It publishes the job, sends the invitations, hands out the drawings, takes the questions and bids back, lets you compare and award them, and keeps the record of all of it.

Bidding used to live in an Outlook folder, a spreadsheet of addresses, and somebody's memory. The portal takes the jobs that were spread across those and does them in one place, against one project.

Manager and Coordinator hold identical permissions. The distinction is who is responsible for the job, not what the software will let you press.

Your first project, start to finish

Create Project, then the project editorAmericon staff

Create a draft, fill in the editor, publish, invite, answer what comes back, then compare the bids and award. Nothing leaves the building until you publish.

The whole path, in the order you will actually walk it. Each step is a topic of its own further down.

1. Create the draft. Name, city and state, bid due date, and the two people responsible. Everything else can wait. Choose Public or Private here — see Visibility, because publishing a job that should have been private cannot be undone once the calendar has served it.
2. Fill in the editor. The rail down the left side is the whole project; each entry shows its own summary, so you can see what is still empty without opening it. Add the scope, the trades, the drawings.
3. Upload the drawings, and give each one a revision label that matches its title block. This is the single most consequential field on the screen — see Revision labels.
4. Publish. Until you do, the project is off the calendar, sends no reminders, and its plan files will not download — an invitation sent from a draft arrives with dead links.
5. Invite. Open Contractor invite email, press Choose who to invite, pick contacts, groups or a whole trade, and read the review step before you send. Send a test to yourself first.
6. Watch the plan holders. Contractors who take the drawings identify themselves, and appear in the project. That list is who you notify when a drawing is revised or the date moves.
7. Answer what comes back. Replies land in the editor's Mail section and you are emailed within minutes. Say what each message is — Bid or Question — and answer questions with Reply, which records the answer for you. A question answered after the job closes was not answered.
8. Compare, then award. Bids sent with the Send your bid button collect sealed until the bid date. Afterwards, open Compare these bids side by side from the Offers panel, type or confirm each figure, level the bids that priced different things, and press Award on the winning row. One more press tells the winner and thanks everyone else.

What contractors do without calling you

The contractor-facing side of the siteAmericon staff

Lost links, calendar subscriptions and "we are not bidding this one" are all self-service. None of them need anybody at Americon to be at their desk.

Every one of these used to be a phone call, and every one of them arrived at the worst possible moment — out of hours, or on the afternoon of the deadline.

• Get their invitation back. A contractor who lost the email asks for it again from the site, and it is sent to the address already on the invitation. Nothing is revealed to somebody typing in a stranger's address.
• Say they are not bidding this one — without unsubscribing from everything. That is the column a bid board needs and a blanket unsubscribe destroys.
• Subscribe to the bid calendar, so public deadlines appear in their own calendar automatically, with no account.
• Add one bid date to their calendar from the project page.
• Take the drawings, identifying themselves as they go.

What the portal can prove afterwards

Project editor, Who has been invitedAmericon staff

Every invitation sent from the portal is recorded with its delivery outcome. That record is what answers a good-faith solicitation question months later.

On a public job, or a job with a participation goal, somebody may eventually ask who was invited to bid. That question arrives long after the memory of it has gone, and an Outlook sent-items folder is not an answer — it does not say whether the message was delivered, and it does not survive the person leaving.

The portal records, per firm: that they were invited, when, what the mail server said about delivery, whether the invitation was opened, whether they took the drawings, and whether they told us they are bidding.

Download the record saves all of it as a spreadsheet — the version to hand to an owner or an auditor.

The audit trail

Dashboard, under the figures — **Audit trail**Americon staff

An append-only record of who changed what and when — deadlines, visibility, plan files and access links. Months later, it is what settles the argument.

Bid deadlines, visibility, plan attachments and access codes are contractual facts, and WordPress keeps no history of them on its own. The audit trail does.

It answers "the due date was different when I looked" and "when did that invite link stop working", long after everybody has stopped remembering. Each entry records what was done, on which job, by whom, and when — with the person's name kept alongside their account, so an entry still names somebody after they have left.

Search by job or by person, narrow it to one kind of change with the Action dropdown, or set From and To dates. The newest entries are first.

The same record is also on every project page, for staff, under Activity at the foot — the last few changes to that one job, folded closed until you open it. That is the quicker route to "who moved this due date" when you are already looking at the project.

The screen shows changes to jobs — deadlines, visibility, plan files, invitation links, bid correspondence, figures, awards, and every opening of a sealed bid. Account changes and sign-ins are recorded too, and an administrator can see those under Tools → Americon Audit Log; they are site administration rather than anything about a bid, so they are not listed here.

What happens without anyone pressing anything

Scheduled, site-wideAmericon staff

The end-of-day summary, deadline reminders, bid-closed notices and the nightly health check all run on their own. You are told when something needs you.

• An end-of-day summary is emailed to you at five, listing everything still open on your jobs — every line a link to the screen where it gets worked. It repeats each day until the item is dealt with.
• A contractor writing to a job emails you within minutes, with a link straight into the reply box.
• Deadline reminders go to plan holders as a bid date approaches.
• Bidding closes on its own at the due date. Closing early, or reopening, is a deliberate act you can take in the editor.
• Addresses that stop working are set aside automatically when mail bounces, so the same dead address is not written to forever.
• The site checks itself every night and mails administrators when something breaks — rather than waiting for a contractor to ring up and report it.

Signing in and where you land

The Sign in button in the header, or /loginAmericon staff

Sign in with your username or email address. Staff land on the calendar dashboard.

Use the Sign in button in the site header. You can enter either your username or the email address on your account.

After signing in, Project Managers and Coordinators are taken to the calendar dashboard, because that is where the day's work starts. Administrators are taken wherever they asked to go.

The old WordPress login screen at /wp-login.php redirects to the branded sign-in page, so a bookmark to either one works.

When sign-in does not work

The sign-in pageAmericon staff

A wrong password says so. A suspended account says so separately — that one needs an administrator, not a password reset. Ten failed tries locks the connection for fifteen minutes.

• Wrong username or password. You are returned to the sign-in page with a message. Use Forgot your password? to have a reset link emailed to you.
• Your account has been suspended. The sign-in is refused with its own distinct message. A password reset will not help; an administrator has to restore the account in User Management.
• You never set a password. New accounts are created without one. The set-password email is the only way in until it is used. Ask an administrator to resend it.
• Too many failed attempts. After ten failures from the same connection within fifteen minutes, further attempts are refused for fifteen minutes. The page says so, and says how long is left.

The lock is on the connection, not on your account: it clears itself after fifteen minutes with nothing to reset and nobody to ring. Your account is not suspended, disabled, or changed in any way by it.

The headline tiles

Calendar Dashboard, above the calendar

A live count of what needs attention now. Each tile is a link into the list or screen already filtered to exactly what it counted. Every tile counts jobs, so the numbers are comparable.

A month grid is good at "how does next month look" and bad at "what needs me today". The tiles answer the second question without any clicking, and each one is a link into the matching filtered list. Hover a tile for a one-line reminder of what it counts.

The first four count work that is out; the last three count work that is owed. Each tile keeps its own colour whatever the number is — red for today, amber for anything that wants attention soon, blue for public, teal for private. A tile showing zero is dimmed rather than recoloured, so the row still reads as distinct things on a quiet week, and colour still means "this needs you".

Under the tiles, staff have three plain links rather than tiles, because none of them has a number that means "act on me": Bounce log, Bid mailbox and Audit trail. They are places you go with a question — did that firm's invitation bounce, is bid mail arriving at all, who changed this due date — and each has its own entry in this manual.

Calendar view and List view

Calendar Dashboard, beside the page title

Two shapes for the same projects. Calendar answers "how does next month look"; List answers "what closes soonest" and adds search, filters and export.

The same set of projects, presented two ways:

• Calendar — a month grid. Best for seeing how a month is shaped and spotting the days that are stacked.
• List — the projects sorted by deadline, soonest first, with the full search and filter bar, sortable column headings, selection, and CSV export.

The choice is carried in the page address, so a link to either view can be bookmarked or sent to someone else and will open in the same view.

Reading the calendar markers

Calendar Dashboard, on the month grid

Each marker is one bid deadline. Colour says whether it is public or private, and whether it is close enough to worry about.

A marker sits on the day a bid closes, not on the day work starts. Colour carries two facts at once:

• Blue — a public project, open for bidding.
• Teal — a private, invite-only project. Only staff ever see these.
• Amber — closing soon. Anything inside 72 hours of its deadline.
• Grey — the deadline has passed.

Opening a day

Calendar Dashboard, click any day on the grid

Click a day to list everything closing on it, with a link straight to each project.

Clicking a day opens a panel listing every project closing that day, each one a link to its details page. Press Escape or the close button to dismiss it.

This works with the keyboard as well as the mouse, and on touch screens. There is no hover behaviour to miss.

Subscribing to bid deadlines

Calendar Dashboard, below the calendar

Subscribe once and every public bid deadline we post from then on appears in your own calendar automatically. No account needed.

The Subscribe in your calendar button hands the feed to whichever calendar application is registered on your machine — usually Outlook or Apple Calendar — and opens its subscribe dialog.

If that button does nothing, which is common on locked-down corporate machines, use Copy feed URL instead and paste the address into your calendar's "add calendar by URL" option.

• The feed carries public, open bids only. Private projects never appear in it.
• Your calendar refreshes it on its own schedule, typically every few hours.
• When a bid date moves, the existing entry moves. You do not accumulate duplicates.
• Times are published as fixed points in time, so a bidder in Denver sees a Chicago deadline correctly converted to their own clock.

Searching

The filter bar at the top of any project list

Matches the project name and its description. Press "/" anywhere on the page to jump straight into this box.

Type a project name or a city and press Filter. The search runs over the project name and description.

Search combines with every other filter rather than replacing them: a search term plus a state plus a due-date preset narrows to the intersection of all three.

Filtering by state

The filter bar at the top of any project list

Narrows to projects in one US state. The list is the same on every page of the site, so a state chosen here means the same thing everywhere.

Choose a state and press Filter. Leave it on All states to clear it.

The state comes from the project record, which is why it is a dropdown rather than free text — a project entered as "Wisc." would never be found by someone filtering on WI.

Filtering by trade

The filter bar, when trades have been set up

Narrows to projects wanting a particular trade. Only appears once Americon has set up its trade list.

Trades are the work packages a project wants priced — electrical, mechanical, sitework, and so on. Choosing one narrows the list to projects tagged with it.

This control is hidden entirely until trades have been created, rather than sitting in the filter bar as an empty dropdown.

Quick filters

Above the list, as a row of links

One-click versions of the questions people actually arrive with. Press an active one again to clear it.

Closing today, Closing this week and Closing soon are one-click deadline filters. Each carries a count, so you can see whether it is worth pressing before you press it. The active one is marked; pressing it again removes it.

They are ordinary links carrying the filter in the address, so any one of them can be bookmarked or pasted into a message and will open showing the same thing.

Staff see a second row — All, Published, Drafts — whenever there is a draft to separate out. Drafts is the one filter that widens the list: it shows drafts from both boards, public and private, and says so above the table.

A chip appears above the list showing which filter is in force, with an × to remove it — so a narrowed list can never be mistaken for the whole list. Arriving from the Contractors not told tile on the dashboard, the chip reads exactly that, because nothing in the columns would otherwise say why the list is three jobs rather than forty.

Results per page

The filter bar at the top of any project list

How many projects to show before paginating. Ten, twenty or fifty.

Sets how many rows appear before the list paginates. Larger pages are worth it when you are about to select rows for export, since selection applies to the page you are looking at.

Include closed

The filter bar, staff onlyAmericon staff

Brings past-deadline and closed projects back into the list. Off by default, and never available to the public.

By default a project drops out of the lists once its deadline passes or it is marked Closed. Ticking this brings them back, which is what you want when looking up a job that has already been bid.

The badges on a row

The status column of each row in a project list, staff onlyAmericon staff

A row says nothing when a job is in order. A badge is an exception: Draft, contractors not told about a change, or nobody holding the plans.

The column only carries exceptions. A row that read "7 plan holders" would be reporting that things are fine, on every project, which is how a list stops being scanned. So the ordinary state is blank, and anything printed is worth reading.

The public and private lists do not badge visibility, because every row on each would carry the same word as the page title. Closed Projects is the one list where the two appear together, so it is the one place a Public or Private badge answers a question, and it is the one place that shows it.

Copy link to this view

The toolbar above the list

Puts the address of the list exactly as you have filtered it on your clipboard, ready to paste into an email.

Every filter lives in the page address, so the address is the saved view. This button copies it.

Whoever opens it sees the same search, state, trade and deadline filter you had — subject to their own permissions. Send a colleague a link to "everything in Wisconsin closing this week" and that is what they get.

Selecting rows

The checkbox on each row, staff onlyAmericon staff

Tick rows to export just those. Shift-click a second box to take everything in between.

Tick individual projects, or use the checkbox in the toolbar to take the whole page at once.

Shift-click selects a range, the way a file manager or mail client does: tick the first row, then shift-click the last, and everything between them follows.

A bar appears at the foot of the list once anything is ticked, showing the running count with Export CSV and Clear.

Exporting to CSV

The toolbar above the list, and the bar at the footAmericon staff

Two exports: "Export all" takes everything matching your filters across every page; "Export CSV" in the selection bar takes only the rows you ticked.

There are two, and the difference matters:

• Export all N in the toolbar carries your live filters, not a list of rows. It exports everything matching — including the rows on pages you never clicked through to.
• Export CSV in the selection bar exports exactly the rows you ticked, and nothing else.

The file downloads immediately and opens in Excel or Google Sheets. It carries the project name, location, deadline, visibility, trades and assigned staff.

Row density

The toolbar above the list

Compact fits roughly a third more rows on screen. Your choice is remembered on this device.

Comfortable is the default. Compact tightens the rows so more fit on screen, which is worth it when working through a long list.

The setting is stored in your own browser and applies to every list on the site. It is per-device, not per-account, so choosing it on your desktop does not change your phone.

How the form is organised

Create Project, down the leftAmericon staff

Overview, Schedule, Contacts, Photo and Plan files are five views onto one form. Nothing is created until you press Create draft — and what it creates is a draft, not a live job.

The sections are the same five the project editor uses, in the same order, so creating a project and later editing it are the same screen doing the same work. Moving between sections changes nothing and creates nothing.

Each entry in the rail says what is still needed — "2 to fill" against a section means a required field in it is empty — and the line under the rail counts every required field across all five, including sections you have not opened.

The button is Create draft, and it means it. The project lands in the editor as a draft — off the calendar, sending nothing, invisible outside Americon — and Publish is a separate press there once there is something to look at. See Drafts and publishing.

Project name

Create Project, OverviewAmericon staff

This is the heading contractors see on the calendar, in the lists and in the subject line of the invite email. Name it the way the drawings do.

The project name appears in more places than anything else on the form: the calendar marker, both project lists, the details page heading, the invite email subject, and the entry in a contractor's own calendar once they subscribe.

Use the name that appears in the title block of the drawings. A contractor who receives an invite for "Devil's Lake Villas" and finds "DL Multi-Unit Phase 2" on the drawings has to stop and check whether they are the same job.

City and state

Create Project, OverviewAmericon staff

Both are required. State is what the list filters run on, so it has to be picked from the list rather than typed.

City is free text and appears under the project name in the lists. State is a dropdown because it drives the state filter — a typed abbreviation would make the project invisible to anyone filtering.

Visibility

Create Project, OverviewAmericon staff

Public puts the project on the bid calendar for anyone to find. Private keeps it off every public surface and reachable only through its invite link.

This is the most consequential field on the form. It can be changed later, but changing it later means a project was briefly in the wrong place.

Drafts and publishing

The project editor, in the bar at the top — the draft is created on the Create Project formAmericon staff

Every project starts as a draft, visible only to Americon staff. Publishing is a separate button, and it is the moment the project becomes real to anyone outside.

A project has two independent settings, and they answer different questions. Confusing them is the commonest mistake on this screen, because "private" sounds like it means "not published" and it does not.

So a private published project is live: invited contractors can open it and take the plans. A public draft is not live at all — it is not on the calendar, and nobody outside can reach it even with the link.

While a project is a draft:

• it is off the bid calendar, the subscribable feed and the public lists,
• its plan files will not download, for anyone,
• it sends no deadline reminders,
• invitations cannot be sent — the console refuses, because every link in that email would open the "not found" page,
• and it appears on the staff boards with a Draft chip, and in the "Unpublished drafts" tile on the dashboard.

Publishing is one button in the bar at the top of the project screen — Publish to the calendar on a public project, Publish to invitees on a private one. On a project marked public it asks first, and states exactly what is about to become visible, including how many plan files.

Trades

Create Project, OverviewAmericon staff

The work packages you want priced. Contractors filter the project lists by these, so a project with none set is harder for the right bidder to find.

Tick every trade you want bidding. They appear on the project row in the lists and drive the trade filter.

Leaving them empty does not break anything — the project is still listed and still on the calendar — but a contractor who filters to their own trade will not see it.

Bid due date and time

Create Project, ScheduleAmericon staff

Required, and it drives almost everything: the calendar position, list sort order, the reminder emails, and when invite links expire.

Pick the date and time from the picker rather than typing, so the value stored is unambiguous. This one field drives:

• where the project sits on the bid calendar,
• the sort order of both project lists — soonest first, always,
• the "closing today" and "closing this week" counts on the dashboard,
• the reminder emailed to plan holders as the deadline approaches,
• the entry in a contractor's own calendar,
• and when the project's invite links stop working.

Estimated start and completion

Create Project, ScheduleAmericon staff

Optional. Shown on the project page so a bidder can judge whether the schedule suits their book.

Both are optional and neither affects the calendar or any filter. They appear on the project details page, where they answer a question a contractor asks before deciding whether to price the job at all: can we actually staff this, when it runs?

Leave them blank rather than guessing. A date on the page reads as a commitment.

Project manager and coordinator

Create Project, ContactsAmericon staff

Both are required when the project is created. They are named in the invite email, and are who a contractor reaches by replying to it.

Both are chosen from portal accounts. They are named on the project details page and in the contractor invite email under "Submitting your bid".

An invitation the portal sends carries a per-project reply address, so a contractor answers by replying to the message and their answer is filed against the job before it reaches either of you. The invitation names the two of you without printing your addresses — a contractor who writes to an address directly is writing somewhere the project record cannot see. There is no longer any way to copy that invitation out and send it from your own mailbox — see The contractor invite email for what replaced it.

• Project manager — responsible for the project and the final bid decision.
• Project coordinator — handles invites, documents and contractor questions.

Naming them is not a permanent assignment — either can be reassigned at any time in the project editor. The requirement is that a project never starts life with nobody answerable for it, because a project sent out with no contacts gives a contractor with a question nobody to ask.

Project photo

Create Project, PhotoAmericon staff

Optional. Used as the image on the project page and in listings. Unlike plan files, this one is public.

A rendering or a site photograph. Optional, and purely presentational.

Uploading plan files

Create Project, Plan filesAmericon staff

Drag files in or browse for them. Large sets upload in pieces, so a big drawing package will not fail part-way through, and you can keep adding while one is still going.

Drop files onto the box or use Browse. Multiple files at once are fine, and each shows its own progress.

Large files are uploaded in chunks rather than in one request, which is what makes a several-hundred-megabyte drawing set survive a slow office connection. If the sign-in token expires during a long upload, it is renewed automatically rather than failing the upload.

• Files land in a protected location, not in the public media library.
• Nothing is served to anyone until the project's visibility and access code have been checked.
• Plan files can be added, replaced and removed later in the project editor.

Dropping more while one is uploading is fine and expected — it is how this form is normally used. The second drop joins the queue behind the first rather than competing with it. Save is the only thing an upload holds; it comes back as soon as everything has finished.

The section rail

Project editor, down the leftAmericon staff

Overview, Schedule, Contacts, Photo, Plan files, Invite email, Mail and Delete. Everything except Invite, Mail and Delete saves together with one Save button.

The sections are views onto one form, not separate forms. Moving between them changes nothing and saves nothing; the Save changes button at the foot commits every section at once.

Three sections are separate because they act immediately rather than on save:

• Contractor invite email — copying and regenerating the access link happen there and then.
• Mail — marking what a message was records it on the spot.
• Delete this project — its own confirmation, its own action.

Each entry in the rail carries a short summary of what is in it, so you can see the file count or the visibility without opening the section.

The Mail section

Project editor, in the section railAmericon staff

Everything contractors have sent about this job, in the job. The rail says how many are waiting before you open it.

Mail about a job used to be reachable only through the invitation record, several moves from the project itself. It is now a section of the editor, next to Invite email: what the portal sent, then what came back.

It is the same Correspondence panel that appears on the invitation record — one screen drawn in two places, not two lists that can disagree. Marking a message here marks it there.

The summary beside Mail in the rail is what you need before opening it:

Answering a question with Reply brings you back here when it has gone, rather than to the invitation record — the answer, and the fact that it is now marked as replied to with your name on it, appears on the row it came from.

The readiness line

Project editor, at the foot of the section railAmericon staff

Live count of required fields still empty, across every section — including ones you have not opened.

It reads "Ready to save" when every required field is filled, and names how many are still empty when they are not. It checks all sections, not just the one on screen, so a missing city on the Overview section is reported while you are looking at Plan files.

Unsaved changes

Project editorAmericon staff

Leaving the page with edits in progress prompts first. Filter and search boxes do not count as edits.

If you have changed anything and try to leave, the browser asks before discarding it.

The trade filter, the file filter and the section you are on are excluded from that check — narrowing a list to find something is not an edit, and being asked to confirm it would train people to click through the warning without reading it.

When two people edit the same project

Project editor, on saveAmericon staff

If the project changed while you had it open, your save is refused rather than applied — so nobody's work is overwritten without being seen.

Nothing stops two coordinators opening the same project, and on a deadline afternoon two people on one job is normal. What is checked is the save.

When you press Save changes, the portal compares the project as it stands against the project as it was when your page was drawn, field by field. If nothing you could overwrite has moved, the save goes through exactly as it always has — which is the ordinary case, and you will never see any of this.

If something has moved, the save is refused. Not partly applied, not applied with a warning: nothing is written at all, so the other person's work is intact and yours is not half-landed somewhere.

The notice names who changed the project, how long ago, and which fields your save would have put back to their earlier values. Then:

• The form reloads showing the project as it now stands — their version, not yours.
• Make your change again on top of it and save. The second save goes through.
• Any plan files or a photo you had queued were not attached. Add them again.

The fields watched are the ones the form writes: project name, city, state, visibility, bid due date, estimated start and completion, project manager, coordinator, scope of work, trades, and which plan files are on the project. Actions with their own buttons — publishing, closing bidding, regenerating the access link — write one thing each and cannot silently undo an edit, so they are not gated.

Who can see this project

Project editor, OverviewAmericon staff

Switching between Public and Private changes the invite link below immediately, but nothing is live until you save.

Two cards rather than a dropdown, because the two options do entirely different things and a closed dropdown explains neither.

Selecting one updates the invite link shown below it straight away, so the link and the setting can never disagree on screen. A warning appears under the link until you save, because until then the new link is not live.

Scope of work

Project editor, OverviewAmericon staff

A line or two on what is actually being bid. It is the field a contractor uses to decide whether to price the job at all.

A name, a city and a deadline tell a contractor where and when. They do not tell them whether the work is theirs. This is the field that does, and it is why an electrical sub can rule a job out — or in — without downloading a set of drawings first.

It appears in three places, from this one box: on the project page under Scope of work, in the invitation email above the estimated dates, and in the plain-text version of that email for contractors whose mail client shows no formatting.

• Say what work is included, and roughly how much of it — "Interior demolition and metal stud framing, 12,000 sf".
• Say the conditions that change a price — prevailing wage, night or weekend phasing, an occupied building, a hard completion date.
• Leave the specification to the drawings. Two thousand characters is the ceiling and far more than the field needs.

Blank lines start a new paragraph and single line breaks are kept, so a short list of trades on separate lines reaches the contractor on separate lines.

The invite link

Project editor, OverviewAmericon staff

The URL to send contractors. For a private project it carries the access code, and it is the only address that will open the project.

Use Copy link and paste it into your email. Do not copy the address out of your browser's address bar — for a private project that address may not carry the access code, and a contractor who receives it lands on a page they cannot open.

• Public project — the link is a plain address with no code. Anyone can open it.
• Private project — the link carries a long access code. Anyone holding it can open the project and download the plans, so treat it as the credential it is.

A private project's links stop working 30 days after its bid deadline.

The trade picker

Project editor, OverviewAmericon staff

The work packages you want priced — contractors filter the project lists by these. Type in the filter box to find one; filtering only hides rows, so a ticked trade scrolled out of view is still ticked and still saves.

The list runs to several dozen trades, so it has a filter box and a running count of how many are selected. Clear all appears once anything is ticked.

Schedule

Project editor, ScheduleAmericon staff

The bid deadline and the estimated construction dates. Changing the deadline moves the project on the calendar and re-times its reminders.

Changing the bid deadline takes effect everywhere the moment you save: the calendar, the list order, the dashboard counts, the subscribed calendar feeds, and the reminder schedule.

Closing bidding early, and reopening it

Project details, beside the status badgeAmericon staff

The bid date closes a project on its own. Close bidding ends it sooner — when a job is awarded or pulled — and Reopen bidding undoes that.

A published project closes itself when its bid date passes, and that stays true whether or not anybody touches these buttons. What they add is the ability to end bidding at a different moment from the one on the calendar.

Managers and coordinators both have them. They are one press with no confirmation, because either one undoes the other.

That last row is the way back. If a bid was closed early and should now run to a new deadline, set the new date in Schedule — it reopens the project and closes it again on the new date, with no second button to remember.

Closing bidding, early or on time, means the project:

• leaves the bid calendar, the open lists and the subscribable feed,
• stays reachable to staff — tick Include closed in the filter bar of either list, or open the Closed Projects board at /closed-projects, which is not in the header — where it can still be read and exported,
• sends no further deadline reminders, and drops out of the staff digest,
• and shows Bidding closed to any contractor who opens it.

Closing sends no email by itself. What it does instead is ask: close a bid ahead of its published date and the project screen names the firms who are working on it and offers the notice, already written, with a They already know button beside it. Both answers are recorded; neither is the default.

The offer goes to the people we know are spending money on the job:

• everyone who took the drawings,
• plus any firm that answered We are bidding — they may never have downloaded anything here,
• minus anyone who said they were not bidding, and anyone who has unsubscribed.

Neither button appears on a draft. Nothing is bidding on a project that has not been published.

Replacing the project photo

Project editor, PhotoAmericon staff

Uploading a new photo replaces the current one. The photo is public even on a private project.

Choosing a file replaces the existing photo when you save.

Managing plan files

Project editor, Plan filesAmericon staff

Every attached file has a Keep box. Unticking one removes the file from the project when you save — nothing is removed until then.

Each attached file shows its name, type and size, with a Keep checkbox. Files stay attached while their box is ticked; unticking one and saving removes it from the project.

Past six files the list gains its own filter box and a Keep all button, and past eight it gets its own scroll so it cannot swallow the page.

File versions and revision labels

Project editor, Plan files, on each fileAmericon staff

The version number is automatic — v1 on upload, v2 the next time a file of the same name lands. The label is free text on top of it: write whatever the drawing's own title block says.

Every plan file carries a version and a date, both set by the portal. A file uploaded for the first time is v1. Upload a file with the same name again and it becomes v2, then v3, and so on. You never type the number.

A replacement takes the old file's place in the list rather than sitting beside it, and keeps its displayed name, so nobody is ever shown two rows called "A-201.pdf" and left to guess. The file it replaced leaves the list but is not deleted — the save confirmation says so each time it happens.

On top of the version, each file can still carry a revision label: free text, and optional. "Rev B", "Addendum 2", "2026-08-04 reissue". Construction has no single convention, and the label on the portal has to match the label in the title block of the drawing itself. The paper wins — so when a label is filled in, it is what contractors see in place of the version number.

There are two ways to issue a revision, and both end in the same place:

• Press Replace on the file's row and pick the new drawing. This states outright which sheet is being superseded, so it works no matter what the new file is called. Use it whenever the reissue arrives under a different name — "A-201_RevB.pdf" for "A-201.pdf".
• Upload a file with the same name. Picked up on its own, no button needed. Unticking Keep on the old row in the same save works too and counts as the same replacement — you never have to save twice.

A row that has been revised gains an earlier issues line you can open. Every superseded drawing is listed there with its version, its label, the date it was replaced and a link to the file itself. Nothing is ever deleted, and this is where it stays.

A revised file is not yet an addendum. Once the revised sheets are uploaded, open the Addenda section and issue the numbered addendum that carries them — see *Issuing an addendum*. The number is what bidders acknowledge; a label is what the drawing says.

Issuing an addendum

Project editor, AddendaAmericon staff

A numbered change to the bid documents. Issue it here after uploading any revised sheets; the number is assigned for you, and every bidder is asked to acknowledge it on their bid form.

An addendum is how a change to the bid documents becomes something a bidder can be held to. Every set of bidding instructions in the industry works the same way: addenda are numbered, issued in writing to every bidder of record, and each bidder acknowledges them by number on the bid form. A bid that leaves one out can be set aside. Revision labels on files cannot do that job — "Rev B" on three sheets is not something anybody can acknowledge or fail to acknowledge.

The section lists what has been issued, newest first, with what changed, the files it carried, whether the bid date moved, and how many firms have been told. Below it is the form for the next one. The number is assigned by the portal — Addendum 1, 2, 3 — and never typed, for the same reason file versions are automatic: it is a fact the portal knows for certain, and asking a person for it is how it ends up wrong.

• What this addendum changes is one line, and it is the line every bidder is asked to acknowledge and the one a protest reads. Write it as the bid form will need it.
• The plan files it carries. Upload the revised sheets in Plan files first; files revised since the last addendum are ticked for you. An addendum can also carry no files at all — a clarification, or a moved date, is still an addendum.
• The bid date. Standard bidding instructions move the bid date for an addendum issued inside four days of it. Inside that window the form will not submit until you have said either that the date moves, and to when, or that it stands because the change is minor. Either answer is recorded with the addendum, by name.

The notice a firm receives — whether a re-issued invitation or a plan-holder update — carries every addendum on the job, numbered, with what changed, the files, the new bid date if it moved, and a Confirm you received this addendum link. That link is a courtesy that tells you whom to phone before bid day. It is not the acknowledgment; the bid form is.

Download all

Project details, Plan files

Packages every plan file into one ZIP. A large set takes a minute to compress — leave the tab open while it works.

Rather than downloading forty drawings one at a time, this compresses the whole set into a single ZIP.

• You are asked to confirm first, because a large set is a large download.
• A progress message appears while the archive is built.
• Do not close or refresh the tab while it is preparing.
• If it takes longer than expected you are told so, rather than being left with a page that appears stuck.

The contractor invite email

Project editor, Contractor invite emailAmericon staff

A ready-made, branded email built from this project. Preview it here, then send it from the portal so the job can say who was asked.

The email is built from the project: name, location, bid deadline with its time zone, the scope of work, the plan documents, the manager and coordinator by name, and a button to the project — carrying the access code when the project is private. Where the directory knows the contact, it opens by name.

Below the button are the two things a contractor can do from the message itself: the Will you be bidding? panel, and Send your bid, which opens their own email addressed to this job and this firm. The manager and coordinator are named without their addresses, because replying to the message is the route that reaches both of them and lands on the record. Only on a site whose bid mailbox is not yet being read are the addresses printed and the two buttons left out — see Who the message comes from, and where replies go.

Choose who to invite is the way out of this panel. You pick contacts and groups, see who is excluded and why before anything goes, and the project remembers who was asked. Each firm gets their own link, so an opening can be attributed to a company, and replies reach the project manager rather than the website.

The preview shows exactly what will be sent, clipped to a readable height. Show the whole email expands it. This is the cheapest place to catch a wrong bid date.

Choosing who to invite

Project editor, Contractor invite email, Choose who to inviteAmericon staff

Pick contacts by group, trade or name, and add addresses by hand. Nothing is sent until you have seen the review page.

The list opens narrowed to the trades on this project, shown as chips above it. Remove a chip to widen the list; clear them all to see every contact. The line above the list always says how many contacts the filters are hiding, so the list is never quietly shorter than you think.

• Tick rows to choose them. Shift-click picks a range.
• The list follows your typing. There is no Apply to press — narrow the search or take a chip off and the rows underneath change, along with the count and the pager. The filtering is done on the server, so Select all matching still means every contact behind the page and not the fifty on it.
• Ticks travel with you. Search again, turn the page, remove a chip, come back from the review — whoever you have ticked stays ticked. Your selection, beside the list, names everyone chosen so far with an × to take them out again, and a chosen row is tinted in the list; anyone the current view no longer shows is also listed under Also selected at the foot of the list. To take everything the filters match in one go, Select all matching is still the faster control.
• Groups and trades narrow together: picking the group "Southern Wisconsin regulars" and the trade "Concrete" gives you the concrete subs in that group, not both lists added together.
• Addresses typed into the box at the bottom are invited and added to the contact list, so nobody has to retype them next time.

Contacts who cannot be written to still appear, greyed, with the reason in place — already invited, unsubscribed, or a dead address. They are shown rather than hidden so that "why didn’t Bob get it?" is answered while the list is still in front of you.

The review step

Project editor, Contractor invite email, after choosingAmericon staff

What pressing Send would actually do, before it does it: who receives an invitation, who is excluded, and why.

These recipients are outside contractors on a live bid. A send reaches all of them at once and cannot be recalled, so everything the portal knows that you do not gets a page of its own first.

• First invitation — firms that have not been told about this project.
• Revised plans — firms already invited, being told that the drawings or the bid date have moved since. They get the invitation again under a heading saying why.
• Already invited — nothing has changed for them, so they are left alone.
• Unsubscribed or bounced — addresses we may not or cannot write to.
• Listed twice — reached through more than one route in this selection, and invited once.

Add a note to this invitation puts a paragraph of your own into the invitation itself — *“Addendum 2 is already posted”*, *“we are targeting a GMP by the 30th”*. It goes to every firm listed above, so it is for something they all need to know.

Send a test to myself first sends the real message for this real project to your own address only — including your note. It is the cheapest way to catch a wrong date or a missing drawing, and it leaves your selection intact.

The last step names them. Under the count, Where each one went lists every firm in that send with what became of its message beside it: Waiting while the queue is still working through them, Server accepted once it has gone, and anything that came straight back sorted to the top. It is one send and not the whole history of the job — the full list is Who has been invited — and Server accepted means the same thing here as it does on that screen: the receiving server took the message, which is not the same as somebody reading it.

When invitations will not go out

Invitation screen, at the top of both stepsAmericon staff

Invitations are held until the bid mailbox has been read once, so every firm on a job is given the same reply address. One press by an administrator clears it for good.

Invitations cannot go out yet at the head of the invitation screen means one thing, and it is not a fault on this project: the bid mailbox has never been read successfully, so the portal will not print a reply address it cannot yet prove anybody is collecting.

It is drawn on the step where firms are chosen and again on the review, deliberately early — the cost of it appearing late is an afternoon spent building a list of four hundred that cannot be sent. While it stands, Send cannot be pressed, and Send again on a single firm's row is refused for the same reason.

The remedy is one press by an administrator: Tools → Americon Bid Mailbox, then Read the mailbox now. It has to succeed once and is never asked for again. Nothing is being switched on — the mailbox is simply proving it can be read before four hundred contractors are told to write to it.

Writing to one firm

Project editor, Who has been invited, the Message link on a firm’s row; Reply on a message in the bid mailboxAmericon staff

A message to a single invited contractor, sent from the portal so it is on the record.

For the thing you would otherwise open Outlook to write: *“We would especially like your number on the sitework package”*, or a question about a bid that has not arrived. It goes to that firm alone.

Reached from Reply on a contractor’s message, it answers that message properly: the question is shown above the box so you are not answering from memory, the subject is filled in as a reply to theirs, and what they wrote is quoted underneath your answer. In their mail client it arrives in the same conversation rather than as a separate email — so a firm that asks three things about one job sees one thread, not three loose messages.

Sending an answer this way marks the question answered — you do not have to go back and press anything. That is the whole reason to answer from here rather than from Outlook: the press that gets forgotten is the one that leaves a question sitting on the worklist with a deadline running against it.

Sent from the portal, it carries their own link to the project, replies reach the project manager, and it lands on that firm’s delivery history with whatever the mail server said about it. Sent from Outlook, none of that is true and there is nothing three weeks later saying you wrote to them at all.

What you type is kept. The firm’s row on Who has been invited gets a Messaged mark, and opening it shows the message in full with the date and your name on it — so "did we tell them the sitework was split out?" is answered from the project rather than from somebody’s Sent folder.

• The project name, the bid date and their link are added for you — write only your own words.
• It does not re-send the invitation. Send again on the same row does that.
• It does not change what the firm has been told about revised plans, so it will not remove them from the list of people who still need to hear about a change.

Telling contractors about a change

Project editor, and the invitation screenAmericon staff

When the bid date moves or plans are revised, the project says how many invited firms have not been told. Sending is still your decision.

The portal records what each firm was told: the bid due date, and the plan files with their revision labels. When either changes, everyone invited under the old version is counted as not yet told, and the project says so until somebody acts.

It is never sent automatically, deliberately. Saving a project is not a decision to email forty-seven firms — a revision is often uploaded in pieces over an afternoon, and each save would be its own blast. An unwanted email cannot be recalled.

• Correcting a spelling, a description or a job title tells nobody. It is not something a contractor would do anything differently about.
• A moved bid date and revised or added drawings both count.
• Removing a drawing is reported but does not re-invite anyone: there is nothing for them to act on.

“The deadline they were shown cannot be confirmed.” On a few older projects the reason given is this rather than a change. It means the firm was invited before the portal kept a change trail, so there is no record of which bid date was in front of them — not that anything has moved.

• It is shown because the honest answer to “have they been told?” is that we cannot say, and a record that quietly assumed either way would not be worth having.
• Contractors never see that wording. If you do re-send, the invitation reads simply as updated.
• Re-sending clears it: the firm is then recorded against the project as it stands today.

Trade coverage

Project editor and the invitation screenAmericon staff

Whether the trades this job is tagged for have anybody invited, and anybody bidding. It only appears when something is missing.

Every other count on this portal is measured in firms. A job needs trades, and five trades covered out of six looks identical to six out of six on every other screen — forty-seven invited, all healthy, and nobody at all pricing the electrical.

This is the only check that asks whether the bid will actually work. It compares the trades on the project against the trades on the contacts who were invited.

• Nobody has been invited for X — a mistake, and one you can fix this afternoon by inviting people. Shown as a warning.
• No contact in the directory does X — nobody to invite yet. A different problem with a different remedy, so it is worded differently: add contacts, or the trade tag is wrong.
• Invited but nobody bidding yet — a risk, not a mistake, and usually just week one. Shown quietly, because a screen that shouts at the normal state of a bid on its first day is a screen people learn to scroll past.

The trades that are covered are left out entirely. This panel is silent on a healthy project, on purpose — it has to still be legible on the morning it says something that matters.

The same check runs across every open job and is listed on the Waiting for an answer screen and in the end-of-day summary, so a trade nobody is on cannot hide on a job nobody has opened this week. The quiet third state — invited, nobody bidding — joins those lists only inside the last three days before the bid date, when silence stops being week one.

Who is actually bidding

Project editor, Who has been invitedAmericon staff

Contractors answer “are you bidding?” from their invitation email. Silence is not a decline — it usually means nobody has opened it yet.

Every invitation carries a Will you be bidding? panel under the plan documents button, with two answers in it: Yes, we are bidding and Not this one. The answer lands on the invitation record against that firm, and the line above it counts the three states.

• Bidding — expect a number from them, and they are told first when anything changes.
• Not bidding — they have passed on this one job. They stay on the invitation list and will hear about the next.
• No answer — the commonest state, and not a decline. Usually nobody has opened the invitation yet.

"47 invited" is not coverage. Eleven bidding is coverage. Three days from a deadline those two numbers tell you completely different things, and before this existed both looked the same on every screen.

A contractor can change their answer at any time by following the link again — a firm that declined in week one and finds capacity in week three needs to be able to say so. Every change is recorded, so "when did they say they were out" has an answer after the job is awarded.

A contact who cannot be invited

Invitation screen, the “Fix this” link on a greyed rowAmericon staff

Bounced addresses are fixed by entering the correct one. Unsubscribes can only be reversed by the firm asking — and the note you write is the record of them asking.

A contact is greyed out and unselectable for one of two reasons, and they are not the same kind of problem. Fix this on the row opens the right remedy for whichever it is.

The address bounced. The receiving server said no such mailbox — usually a typo, somebody who has left the firm, or a domain that changed. Enter the address that is actually correct and it replaces the one on the contact.

• Retyping the same address is refused. We have the receiving server's word that it does not work, so retyping it changes nothing.
• The old address stays on the do-not-mail list. It still does not work, and the next person to type it by hand should get the same warning you did.
• An address already belonging to another contact is refused, because saving it would merge the two firms into one row and the losing firm would drop out of every group it was in.

The address is right and the bounce was wrong. This does happen — a mailbox created that morning, a receiving server misconfigured for a day, a domain part-way through a move. The panel underneath clears the block, and asks you to write down how you know. That note is recorded against your name, and if mail to the address fails again it is blocked again.

The firm unsubscribed. There is no address field here, because nothing about the address is in question — they asked us to stop. Only they can reverse that, and only by asking.

• If they have asked, record how: a phone call and roughly when, an email, a conversation on site.
• Wanting them to bid is not consent. Neither is a colleague saying they are probably fine with it.
• That note is what the portal will show if anyone ever asks why an unsubscribed firm was written to again.

Your selection

Invitation screen, beside the contact listAmericon staff

A running count of what you have chosen and what it would do, so you do not have to reach the review page to find out.

The panel beside the list keeps up with what is ticked. It changes nothing and sends nothing — it is the answer to "what have I actually got here" while you are still building the selection.

• What would happen splits the selection into firms that have never seen this job and firms already invited who would be told what has changed since. Those are different messages, and the balance between them is usually the thing worth checking.
• Reached by shows which group chip brought in each part of the selection, biggest first. This is how you catch a chip you did not mean to leave ticked — twenty firms arriving from a group you forgot about show up here as a line with a number beside it.
• Not selectable on this page counts the rows the list is showing but will not let you tick: already invited, or blocked. Each one is greyed in the list with its reason on the row.

Contacts added by hand appear under Reached by as "Added by hand", because a firm nobody's group named is worth being able to see.

Who has been invited

Project editor, Contractor invite email, Who has been invitedAmericon staff

Every firm on this project, when it was asked, what became of the message, and whether they said they are bidding. Click a row to read everything exchanged with that firm.

This is the solicitation record for the job — the list to open when somebody asks who was invited, and the list to open when one of them cannot find their email.

The tiles across the top are where the bid stands: how many firms said they are bidding, how many said they are not, and how many have not answered. A fourth tile appears once a bid has actually been marked as received. Those figures are what tell a healthy bid from one where everybody passed — both are the same number of firms invited.

Two of the columns are easy to confuse and are deliberately separate:

• Invited is the date this firm was brought into the bid. It never changes, no matter how many messages go out afterwards. It is the date that matters if the job is ever audited for good-faith solicitation. Underneath it is how the firm came to be on the list — the group that named it, or "Added by hand".
• Delivery is what became of the last message to them — whether the contractor’s own mail server accepted it, delayed it or bounced it. The line under that badge counts the invitations: a firm invited in June and sent revised plans in July reads "2 invitations", with the date of the last one.

Opened is the first time that firm followed the link in their own invitation and landed on the project. It is not a read receipt, and it is not the plan files — taking the drawings puts a firm on the plan holders list instead, which is the stronger signal of the two. Repeat looks are counted beside the date, and a tab left open and refreshed all afternoon still counts as one.

Where there is something recorded, click anywhere on the row to open that firm’s Delivery history — every message sent to them on this job, every reply, and the whole exchange in order. The firm’s name, the delivery badge and the messaged mark are all links to the same screen, so ctrl-click or the middle button opens it in a new tab and you keep your place in the list.

A Messaged mark under that line means somebody here has written to this firm in their own words, and it says when and how many times. It is only on the rows it is true of, so it is worth scanning for. Open it to read what was said.

Bidding? is what that firm has told us, from the buttons in their own invitation: bidding, not bidding, or no answer yet. Silence is not a decline — it usually means nobody has opened it. Under that badge is Mark bid received, which records that their numbers turned up; it sends nothing, it can be undone from the same spot, and both directions are on the audit trail.

A firm with nothing marked beside its name holds the current version of the bid. Only the exceptions carry a badge there: Not told what changed means the drawings or the deadline have moved since they were last written to, and Will not receive mail means the address unsubscribed or bounced.

Send again re-delivers the invitation to one firm. Use it when a contractor deleted the email, never received it, or is holding a link that no longer opens.

• It does not change the Invited date, and it does not create a second invitation.
• If the plans or the deadline have moved since they were invited, the message they get says so in the first line — they are not sent a stale invitation quietly.
• Firms who unsubscribed or whose address bounced show the reason in place of the button. That refusal cannot be overridden from here, because it is not ours to override.
• The same address cannot be sent to twice within a few minutes. Mail takes that long to arrive, and a second copy does not make the first one faster.

Message writes to that firm on its own, in your own words — the thing you would otherwise open Outlook for. It does not re-send the invitation, and it does not change what they have been told about revised plans. See Writing to one firm.

Download the record saves the whole thing as a spreadsheet — every firm asked, every message, and every outcome. That is the version to hand to an owner or an auditor; see The solicitation record, as a file.

Proving an invitation was sent

Project editor, Who has been invited, a firm’s name or its delivery badgeAmericon staff

The whole exchange with one firm about this job — what they wrote, what was written back, when each message left and what their own mail server said.

This is the answer to the phone call that starts "we never got the invitation". It shows the address the portal wrote to, the date and time each message left, and the reply from the mail server on the other end.

The head names the firm, the person there and their phone, and the job the screen is about, with its bid date. Under it is one row of facts about this firm on this job: when they were invited, what became of the last message, whether they opened it, what they said, whether a bid came in, and how many of their messages are waiting on us. Copy as a sentence turns the delivery facts into a line for pasting into a reply.

The conversation comes next, when there is any: what the firm wrote to the bid address and what somebody here typed back, in one list, newest at the top. Every message says who wrote it and when; each of theirs says whether it has been dealt with — Replied 1 Sep by Dana, Acknowledged 1 Sep by Dana — or is still Waiting for an answer, in which case Reply and Acknowledge are on the message itself. A reply says which question it answered. Clicking a subject on a project’s Correspondence panel lands you here, on that message.

The two halves are not held the same way, and the screen says so. Our side is the prose that was typed, in full, with the date and the person who wrote it. Their side is the opening of their message: the portal records that it arrived and how it began, and the message itself, with anything attached to it, stays in the bid mailbox and is never deleted from it.

Invitations and revision notices are not in the conversation; they are the ones the portal composed, and they are in the table underneath — Sent to this address — with what became of each one.

Two sections are folded at the foot, each with its counts on the line, and open on a click. Their record with us is this firm across every job they have been invited to. Elsewhere with this firm is their correspondence on the other jobs, one line per message, so a question you are about to answer can be checked against the one they asked in March — click the job to read that exchange in full.

The outcomes mean different things and call for different replies:

• Accepted by their mail server — their end took the message. Ask them to check their junk folder before it is sent again.
• Their mail server delayed it — a temporary refusal, usually greylisting or our own hourly limit. It is retried.
• Bounced back — refused outright. The address is wrong or gone, and the right fix is a new address rather than another attempt.
• Sending failed — the message never left us. Worth raising, and worth sending again.

Two lines on this screen mean the portal cannot tell you, and they are deliberately not written as failures:

• Sent before delivery logging began — the invitation went out before the portal started recording outcomes. The invitation itself is still on the record with its date; there is simply nothing to show about its delivery.
• No delivery record — the invitation record says a message went out after logging began, and no message was logged. Those two disagree. Raise it before promising the contractor anything.

The solicitation record, as a file

Project editor, Who has been invited, Download the recordAmericon staff

A spreadsheet of every firm asked to bid this job and what happened to each message — the version to hand to an owner or an auditor.

The screens answer a question somebody is asking now. This answers the one asked months later by somebody who was not in the room: show me that this job was solicited widely, and show me the evidence. It downloads as a spreadsheet you can attach to an email or file with the bid tab.

One row per message, plus a row for every invited firm the delivery log has nothing for. The columns are:

• Firm, Email and Invited — who was asked and when. The invitation date is the fact a good-faith effort is judged on, and it is in the file whether or not there is a delivery outcome beside it.
• On the invitation record — "No" marks mail this site sent about the job that was not an invitation: a plan-holder notice, or a coordinator’s test send. They are included so the file is a complete account rather than a selection.
• Outcome and What the mail server said — the same words the Delivery history screen uses, and the recipient’s own reply where there was one.

When a contractor loses their invite link

Anywhere — this is the answer to a phone callAmericon staff

They can get it back themselves from the portal, or you can send it from Who has been invited. Never regenerate the access code to fix one lost email.

This is the commonest support call on the portal, and there are three ways to answer it. Two of them are right.

• Let them do it. A contractor who follows a dead or missing link lands on a page offering Send my invitation again. They enter the address the invitation was sent to and it goes back to that address. Nobody at Americon has to be at their desk, which matters most on a deadline afternoon.
• Do it for them. Open the project, go to Who has been invited, find the firm and press Send again. This is the route when they are on the phone, or when the address they are asking from is not the one that was invited.

The self-service page never says whether an address was recognised, and that is deliberate: a page that confirmed it would be a way for a competitor to learn who is bidding a job. It shows the same sentence either way, so a contractor who typed the wrong address sees exactly what one who typed the right address sees.

The commonest genuine failure is not a lost email at all. The invitation went to the office manager and the estimator is asking from their own address, which was never on the list. The self-service page will find nothing — invite the estimator's address properly instead, so the record shows they were asked.

Send everyone the new link

Project editor, Contractor invite email, private projects onlyAmericon staff

The other half of regenerating the access code: puts a working link back in the hands of everyone already invited.

Regenerating the access code stops every link already sent. This is how the firms who should still have access get a working one back.

It is a separate press rather than part of regenerating, on purpose. The usual reason to regenerate is that a link reached somebody it should not have — and re-sending automatically in the same click would mail a fresh link straight back to them. Rotate first, look at who is on the record, then decide.

• Every firm on the invitation record is sent the invitation again, carrying the current access code.
• The date each firm was first invited does not change.
• Unsubscribed and bounced addresses are excluded, and you are told how many.
• If an invitation run is still going out, this refuses rather than taking it over — starting a second run would abandon the first one part-way.

Invite reach

Project editor, Contractor invite email, private projects onlyAmericon staff

How many distinct devices have opened this project's invite link, in total. Zero opens two days before a deadline is a delivery failure, not a quiet week.

Who has been invited says, per firm, whether their own link was opened. This is the same fact added up across the whole job: how many distinct devices have opened the invite link at all, and when the first and most recent open happened.

The two answer different questions. The per-firm column says which firm is about to miss a deadline. This number says whether the send got out of the building — a stale list, a message filtered as spam everywhere, and a link pasted wrong all look identical from the per-firm view, and all three are still fixable if you notice before the deadline.

• Shown on private projects only. A public project is on the calendar for anyone to find, so its open count says nothing about whether an invite was delivered.
• It counts devices, not people, and never records who they were. One contractor opening the link on a phone and a laptop counts twice; a firm whose link was forwarded round the office counts once per device.
• No IP address, browser or referrer is stored. A device is reduced to a one-way hash purely so one person refreshing four times counts once.
• That list is capped, and discarded once the bid is well past its date. The per-firm record of who opened what is part of the solicitation record and stays with the project.

Regenerating the access link

Project editor, Contractor invite email, private projects onlyAmericon staff

Issues a new access code and kills every link already sent. Use it when a private link has gone somewhere it should not have.

This is the revocation control. Pressing it issues a fresh access code; every invite link handed out up to that moment stops working immediately.

Once you have regenerated, Send everyone the new link appears below it. That is how the firms who should still have access get a working link back — the invitation screen will not do it, because it skips everyone already invited.

Every regeneration is recorded — who did it, when, and why — so the question "when did that link stop working" has an answer later.

A public project has no access code and nothing to regenerate; the panel says so instead of offering a button that would do nothing.

Deleting a project

Project editor, Delete this projectAmericon staff

Moves the project to the Trash. It leaves the calendar and every list at once and invite links stop working. An administrator can restore it.

Deleting is recoverable — the project goes to the WordPress Trash, not to nothing — which is why both staff roles are allowed to do it. You are asked to confirm, and the panel tells you how many plan files are attached before you decide.

The moment it is deleted:

• it disappears from the bid calendar, both project lists and the subscribable feed,
• its invite links stop working,
• and contractors holding those links lose access to the plans.

Who has taken the plans

Project editor, Plan files, below the file listAmericon staff

Contractors who gave their name and email before downloading the plans. Each row shows when they took the plans and when the portal last told them about a change — "Not yet" means it has not.

Each row is a contractor who filled in the short form before downloading: company, contact name, email, when they took the plans, and when they were last notified.

The Notified column is the one to read before issuing an addendum. "Not yet" means that contractor has heard nothing from the portal since they downloaded.

Notify these plan holders

Project editor, Plan files, plan holders panelAmericon staff

Emails everyone holding the plans. Write only what changed — the current revisions, the bid date and a project link are added for you.

This is what the plan holder list exists for. Use it whenever a drawing is revised, an addendum is issued, or the bid date moves.

1. Open Notify these plan holders.
2. Check the subject, which is pre-filled with the project name.
3. Under What changed, write only the change itself: *"Addendum 2 has been issued. Sheets A-101 and A-102 are superseded."*
4. Press Send to myself first and read the result.
5. Then press Send to all N.

Added to every message automatically: the current plan revisions, the bid due date, a link to the project, and an unsubscribe link. You do not need to write any of it.

Sending happens in the background in batches, so a long list does not depend on you keeping the page open. A progress line reports how many have gone and how many remain; you can leave the page and come back to it. Contractors who have opted out are skipped automatically.

Automatic reminders

Sent automatically — no control to pressAmericon staff

Plan holders are warned before their bid closes. What is closing on your own jobs reaches you in the end-of-day summary.

A warning goes to plan holders 48 hours before their bid closes, without anyone pressing anything, because the failure mode is quietly missing it.

Staff are not sent a separate reminder. What closes within two days, and what closed without its bids being recorded, are two sections of the end-of-day summary — beside the questions waiting for a reply and the trades nobody is on — so it arrives as one email about your jobs rather than a second one about everybody's.

Every project records which reminders it has already sent, and that record is checked before each send — so a reminder cannot go out twice even if the site's scheduler runs a job more than once.

Reminders go through the same sending path as manual notifications, which means opt-outs are honoured in both.

What the directory is for

Contacts, from the main navigationAmericon staff

Everyone shares one list. A contact added or corrected here is corrected for every coordinator, on every job, from that moment.

Invitations used to go out from whichever distribution list the sending project manager kept in their own Outlook profile. That list was private to one person, left with them, and could not be reported on — so nobody could answer "who did we invite to this job?" a month later.

This is that list, held once and shared. Search by company, name or any part of an email address; narrow by trade, city or state; open a contact to correct it.

• One row per person, not per company. Two estimators at the same firm are two contacts, invited independently.
• Search is a substring — typing acm finds *Acme*, and typing the middle of an address finds it too.
• The list follows the typing. It narrows a moment after you stop, over the whole directory rather than the page in front of you, and emptying the box puts everybody back. The *Filter* button still works and does the same thing.
• Ticks travel with you. Contacts you have ticked stay ticked through a search, a sort, a page turn and opening a contact — and any the current filters no longer show are listed under *Also selected* at the foot of the table, where you can see them and untick them.
• Inactive contacts are hidden by default. Switch Status to *Both* to see them.
• Click a column heading to sort by it, and again to reverse it. The sort stays with you through the filters, the pages and opening a contact. On a phone the headings are not on screen, so the same columns appear as a row of *Sort by* buttons above the list.

Two of those columns are worth knowing about. Location sorts by the town, because that is what the column shows — to work by state, use the state filter, which is the tool for it. Reachable starts with the problems at the top, since finding the addresses that have stopped working is the only reason to sort by it.

What a firm has done, and what was said

Contacts, on an open contact, under the formAmericon staff

Under the details somebody typed about a firm are the two things the firm did: their record across every job, and every message to and from them.

Everything in the form above a contact is what one of us wrote down about them. The two panels underneath are the parts they wrote themselves, and they are what the page is actually opened for between bids — deciding whether to ask this firm again, or working out what to say to one that has gone quiet.

Their record with us counts across every job: how many they were invited to, how many they opened, where they said they were bidding, where they passed, and where they never answered. Bids marked received are counted on a line of their own, and only once there is one — a permanent "0 bids received" beside a firm's name is an accusation made out of a column nobody was filling in a year ago. The same rule applies to Awarded 2 of those jobs, which appears once the firm has been given work through the portal and not before.

Under the counts, where it applies, is the sentence they add up to. Three firms can look identical in those numbers and be three different problems, so the panel says which:

• Mail to this address is not arriving — their server has refused everything and accepted nothing. That is the address, not the firm: the wrong contact, somebody who has left, a mailbox that no longer exists. It has been counted as invited on every job in the meantime, so the coverage figures for that trade have been overstating themselves for as long as it has been wrong. Worth a phone call and a corrected address.
• Nobody has ever opened an invitation from this address — and where the mail log shows their server accepted the mail, it says so. What happens after a server accepts a message is not something this portal can see, and the difference between saying that and not saying it is the difference between a prompt and an accusation.

Conversations is the other half: everything this firm has written to the bid address, and everything written back to them from a job, in one list in the order it happened. Each entry names the job, says whether it was marked a bid or a question, counts what was attached, and shows the opening of what was written. Older messages beyond the most recent are not listed here — they are still on the jobs they belong to.

The same Their record with us panel appears on the delivery screen inside the invitation console, drawn from one place so the two cannot word it differently.

The email address is the contact

Contact detailsAmericon staff

One contact per address, and the address is what identifies them. Changing it does not update a person — it makes a different contact.

A contact is identified by their email address and nothing else. Two people cannot share one address in the directory, and one person with two addresses is two contacts.

That is deliberate. You can only send one message to estimating@acme.com however many people read it, so a second row would mean inviting that firm twice.

• A shared estimating mailbox holds one name — whoever was entered most recently. That is normal and nothing needs doing about it.
• Somebody who changes firms gets a new address, so they arrive as a new contact. Their old one keeps its history until it starts bouncing.
• Names are not treated as important. People spell them differently and misspell them; as long as the address is right, the contact is right.

Trades, and why they come from a list

The filter rail, and on each contactAmericon staff

Chosen from a fixed list rather than typed, so a filter finds everyone. Ticking several means ANY of them, not all.

Trades are picked from a list a manager maintains, not typed in. Free-form tags look easier and fail quietly:

Filtering "Electricians" there returns 31 of the 49 people meant, and nothing anywhere says so. A filter that quietly returns two-thirds of the right answer is worse than one that returns none, because nobody double-checks a plausible result — and the cost lands as a subcontractor who stopped being invited without anyone deciding that.

The number beside each trade is how many active contacts carry it. Read it before filtering: it tells you whether an empty screen means the filter is wrong or the trade genuinely has nobody in it yet.

A trade accumulates on a contact over time as people learn what a firm actually does. Importing never removes one — that is done here, on the contact, where you can see what you are taking away.

Prequalification: insurance, licence, W-9, safety rating

On each contact, under Trades and GroupsAmericon staff

Four dates typed from the documents in your inbox. A lapsed one is said beside the firm when inviting, on the tabulation, and at award — and never blocks anything.

Every subcontract needs a current certificate of insurance, a current licence and a W-9 on file, and many owners cap the safety rating (EMR) at 1.00. The prequalification products the big platforms sell collect those documents from the contractor. This portal takes no uploads from contractors, by decision — so it keeps the part that actually prevents a bad award: when each one expires, typed by you from the document that arrived by email.

Dates can be typed as 2027-03-01 or 3/1/2027. Anything that is not a date is dropped rather than stored as a guess. The contact export carries all five columns and the import reads them back, so a spreadsheet of certificate dates can be loaded in one go.

Getting contacts out of Outlook

Contacts → Import contactsAmericon staff

Export your contacts folder to CSV and upload it. Nothing is written until you have seen a preview of exactly what it would do.

Two ways in. Use the file unless you cannot.

• Upload a CSV. The normal route, and the only one that carries phone numbers, companies and Outlook categories. In Outlook: File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → Comma Separated Values, then pick the contacts folder. Google Contacts and any spreadsheet export the same shape.
• Paste a list of addresses. For a distribution list, which is a single item stored *inside* a contacts folder rather than contacts in it — so the export either skips it or emits one row with everybody mashed into a field. Addresses that live only in the Global Address List are the same.

To get a distribution list out of Outlook: start a new message, drop the list into the To: field, press the + beside it to expand it into individual people, then select the whole field and copy. Paste that in.

The paste box understands what actually comes off the clipboard — Bob Smith <bob@acme.com>;, the bracketed form, bare addresses, one per line, or all on one line. A name in front of an address is kept as the contact name.

Taking contacts out, and moving them between sites

The toolbar above the contact listAmericon staff

The button says how many contacts it will write. That number is what your filters are showing — if it is lower than you expected, a filter is on.

Export all N writes every contact matching your current filters to a CSV — not just the page you are looking at. It opens in Excel or Google Sheets, and it is written in the shape this site's own importer reads, so it can be loaded straight into another copy of the portal.

Read the number on the button before pressing it. It is the same count as the line above the list, and it is there because the contact list opens filtered to Active. An export taken without noticing that is missing every inactive contact, and nothing in the file says so.

To move contacts from one site to the other: export here, then use Import contacts on the other site and upload the file. Contacts are matched on their email address, so re-importing is safe and updates rather than duplicates.

Three things deliberately do not travel with the file:

• Status. It is in the file so you can read it, but the importer ignores it and every contact arrives Active. Deactivating a firm is a decision somebody makes on the contact, not something a spreadsheet column does silently.
• Who has been sent what, and who opened it. That is a record of messages *this* site sent. Carrying it across would make the other site claim a history it does not have.
• Anything you left out of the file. An import never clears a field the file has no column for, so a partial export cannot wipe phone numbers or trades already entered on the other side.

Reading the import preview

Contacts → Import contacts, after choosing a fileAmericon staff

Set which column means what, then read the sentence at the top: it says exactly how many rows would import and how many need you first. Nothing is written until you press the button.

An Outlook export has around ninety columns and you need six of them. The recognised ones are matched automatically; everything else stays on Do not import, which is the correct answer for it.

Change any dropdown and press Update the preview to see the effect. Nothing is written by that.

Read the sentence at the top of the summary first. It says what pressing the button would do — *"78 of 94 rows would be imported. 16 need a decision from you first."* It is coloured for the answer: green when the whole file imports cleanly, amber when something wants looking at, red when nothing would be imported at all. Everything below it is the evidence it was drawn from.

Then the counts, which always cover every row in the file:

Findings appear below the counts when they apply. None of them stops the import:

• Addresses inside our own organisation. The one finding that changes what gets written — see [[contacts-import-internal]].
• Contacts per email domain. Not a problem, just a census. A file that is mostly one or two domains is somebody's whole mailbox rather than a bidder list.
• Categories that are not trades yet. Outlook categories that are not on the trade list, with how many contacts carry each. This is the useful half of the trade list being fixed: add the ones worth having and import again.
• States that were not recognised. Full names like *Wisconsin* are converted for you. Anything left over is imported with no state, so those contacts will not appear in a region filter.
• One firm, spelled more than one way. Contacts at the same email domain filed under different company names, which makes one firm look like two everywhere. Nothing is corrected automatically — which spelling is right is your call.

Finding the rows that need you. The table lists the file in its own order, which is how you find a row again in the spreadsheet — but twelve problems among four hundred rows are invisible that way, and the table stops at a hundred. Switch it to Needs a decision to list only those, however far down the file they are.

Under the table, Copy the flagged rows opens a plain-text block: every flagged row with its address and its reason, all of them, not just the first hundred. Paste it beside your spreadsheet and work down it. Fixing the source file means the next import is clean as well, which patching contacts afterwards does not.

Why our own addresses are left out

Contacts → Import contacts, before committingAmericon staff

Colleagues and conference rooms are not bidders. They are skipped unless you untick the box.

An Outlook export is usually somebody's whole address book, so it arrives full of colleagues. The first real one tried here held 94 contacts and every single one was internal — staff at our own domains, plus three conference-room mailboxes. Not one subcontractor.

Nothing about that file is broken, which is the point. Every row reads correctly and the preview reports 94 healthy new contacts. Committing it would have put the whole company in the bidder directory, and the next project invitation would have gone to all of them.

So two kinds of address are recognised and left out by default:

• Our own mail domains — the domain we send bid invitations from, and the domain this site runs on.
• Microsoft 365 tenant addresses ending .onmicrosoft.com. Nobody puts one on a business card; they are room and resource mailboxes.

Sibling companies are not detected, because nothing in the software can know which other firms are ours. Instead the preview shows a count of contacts per email domain. A file that is mostly one or two domains is somebody's mailbox rather than a bidder list, and that census is what makes it obvious at a glance.

Groups: a selection you save once

Contacts → GroupsAmericon staff

A saved set of contacts, so the same twenty firms need not be rebuilt from filters every time.

A filter answers "who is a roofer in Monroe County". A group answers "who do we actually send this to" — which is a judgement, not a query, and it is worth keeping once somebody has made it.

Name it after the selection it saves: *Southern Wisconsin regulars*, *Concrete shortlist*, *Municipal work*. Groups are optional and earn their keep once the same firms go on invitation after invitation.

There are two ways to put contacts in a group, and for anything more than one firm the first is the one to use.

• From the contact list, in bulk. Filter to what you want, tick the rows, and use Add to group on the bar that appears. Shift-click picks a range. If the filters match more contacts than one page shows, Select all N matching takes the whole set including the pages you have not looked at. You can type a new group name straight into the bar instead of picking one — the group is created and filled in the same press.
• From a single contact. Open a firm and tick the groups it belongs to. This is the right direction when you are already looking at one contact and know which lists it belongs on.

The count on the bar is what will be changed, and it is worked out again at the moment you press the button — so it acts on the contacts the filters describe, not on a number that has gone stale.

• Add to group skips anybody already in it, and tells you: "12 added, 40 chosen" means 28 were already there.
• Remove from group takes the selection out of the group. It cannot delete a contact or a group — only the membership.
• Renaming keeps every member. The name is a label on the group, not its identity.
• Deleting forgets the grouping and nothing else — every contact stays in the directory. It asks you to type the name first, because a group is shared and the person deleting it may be the only one who thinks it is finished with.
• Clicking a group name shows its contacts, filtered. Adding a contact from there pre-ticks that group.

Adding and changing trades

Contacts → TradesAmericon staff

The closed list every contact is filed under. Add the ones you actually filter by.

The trade list is closed on purpose. Free text gives you *Concrete*, *concrete* and *Concrete Work* as three separate filters, and a directory where the filter misses a third of the firms is worse than one with no filter at all.

So extending it is deliberate, and done here rather than beside the checkboxes on a contact — a trade added there would look like a property of that one firm, which is how a list ends up carrying *Concrete (Baraboo)*.

That last row is why removing a trade asks for no confirmation: it destroys nothing. Deleting a group does ask you to type the name, because that one cannot be undone.

Inactive, and deleting

Contact details, at the footAmericon staff

Inactive is almost always the right choice: it keeps the contact and its history and takes them out of every selection.

Inactive hides a contact from the default view and leaves them out of selections, while keeping the company, trades, phone number and the record of every job they were invited to. It is reversible.

Delete removes the contact outright. There is no undo, and everyone shares this list.

Deleting asks you to type the contact's email address. That is on purpose: a confirmation you can click through without reading is not a confirmation, and this one cannot be undone.

Who the message comes from, and where replies go

Applies to every message the portal sendsAmericon staff

Everything sends from one Americon address so it passes the receiving server's checks — but the reply goes to whoever is assigned to that project, not to the shared mailbox.

Every message leaves as Americon Construction, from a single company address. That is not a style choice: mail servers check that the sender matches the domain that authorised it, and a message claiming to be from a personal address while leaving through a different account is what lands in a spam folder.

Replies are handled separately, and where they go depends on whether the portal is reading the bid mailbox yet.

• Once the bid mailbox is being read, every invitation carries its own reply address naming that job and that firm, so a reply files itself against the record and the people on the job are emailed that it arrived. This is the arrangement the portal is built around.
• Before that, a Reply-To points at the project manager assigned to the project, or the coordinator if no manager is set. The contractor reaches a person; the portal has no record of it.
• If neither is set and the bid mailbox is not being read, no Reply-To is added at all and replies go to the company address. Assigning somebody on the project is what fixes that.

The hourly sending limit

Applies automatically to bulk sendsAmericon staff

The mail host allows a fixed number of messages an hour. The portal counts them and pauses before hitting the ceiling, rather than being cut off partway through a list.

The mail provider caps how many messages an account may send per hour. Going over it does not queue anything — the provider simply refuses, and the account cannot send at all until the hour has passed. That has happened here before, and it is the one email failure this portal has actually had.

So the portal keeps its own count and stops short of the ceiling on purpose. A notification to a long list is sent in batches, and if the remaining budget will not cover the next batch, the send pauses and resumes on its own once the hour has rolled forward.

• Nothing is lost when a send pauses. It picks up where it stopped.
• You do not need to keep the page open, or press anything again.
• Some of the budget is held back for one-off messages — a password reset, a single invite — so a large mailing cannot lock out the person trying to get an account working.

When an address stops working

Applied automatically to every recipientAmericon staff

An address the mail server rejects outright is set aside and not tried again. A temporary failure is only set aside after it repeats.

Contractors change jobs and companies fold, so addresses collected over a few years will contain some that no longer exist. Continuing to mail them is not merely useless — a sender who keeps mailing dead addresses is treated as less trustworthy by receiving servers, which starts to affect delivery to everybody else on the list.

The portal therefore watches what the receiving server says and reacts differently to the two kinds of failure:

A single temporary failure clears itself the next time that address is reached successfully, so a contractor whose mailbox was full for a day does not slowly accumulate strikes across the year.

Bringing a set-aside address back

Beside any contact marked as bouncedAmericon staff

A bounced address cannot simply be re-ticked. Someone has to confirm the address is right — by phone, or from a reply — and that confirmation is recorded against their name.

An address the portal has set aside is shown as such and cannot be selected for a send. Clearing that is deliberately a step rather than a checkbox, because the reason it was set aside was a mail server stating the address does not exist — and disagreeing with that on a hunch just repeats the bounce.

1. Confirm the address independently: a phone call, a reply from the contractor, or a corrected address on a recent bid.
2. Open the contact. The panel headed This address bounced sits under the form.
3. Say briefly how it was confirmed, and press Clear and allow sending. That note is kept.

The address becomes selectable again, and the audit trail records who cleared it, when, and what they said. If it bounces again it is set aside again — the verification is a statement about one moment, not a permanent exemption.

The same clearance is offered in two other places, and all three do the same thing: Fix this on a greyed row of the invitation screen, and Clear beside the address on the Bounce log. Use whichever you are already looking at.

Who has unsubscribed, and what happens to them

Contact directory, and Tools → Americon Self CheckAmericon staff

Unsubscribing takes effect immediately and marks the contact inactive. Nothing is deleted, and only the contractor themselves can undo it.

Every message the portal sends carries an unsubscribe link, and it works the moment somebody uses it — no waiting, no queue, nobody to ask.

Three things happen at once:

1. The address stops being mailed, and stays stopped.
2. The contact is marked inactive in the directory. They drop out of the default view and out of every selection, so nobody has to remember.
3. The unsubscribe is recorded with its date, so the list can be read back later.

The self-check page reports how many unsubscribed in the last thirty days. Read that number as a comment on what was sent rather than on the addresses: a run of them in one month usually means one mailing reached people who were not expecting it.

Putting an unsubscribed contact back on the list

Beside any contact marked unsubscribedAmericon staff

Only when the contractor has asked. You record how they asked, and that note is kept — it is the evidence the request came from them and not from us.

A contractor who unsubscribed and later rings up wanting invitations again can be put back on. This is the only thing that reverses an unsubscribe.

1. Open the contact.
2. Use Opt back in.
3. Write how they asked: *"Phoned 12 Aug, Bob asked to be re-added."* This is required.

The address becomes mailable again and the contact goes back to active in the directory.

What was sent, and what happened to it

Recorded automatically for every messageAmericon staff

Every message the portal sends is recorded with its recipient, its project, and whether it was delivered, deferred or rejected.

Until now the portal could say a message had been handed to the mail server and nothing after that. The log records the outcome as well, per recipient, which is what makes "was this contractor actually told?" a question with an answer.

• Accepted by their mail server — taken by the far end for delivery.
• Their mail server delayed it — a temporary problem, or our hourly limit. It will be tried again.
• Bounced back — refused. That address is set aside.
• Sending failed — the message never left us.
• Held back before sending — the recipient had unsubscribed or was already set aside.

Those are the same words the Delivery history screen uses for one firm, and the same words in the downloaded solicitation record, because they are the same outcomes — see Proving an invitation was sent.

The log is kept per project as well as overall, so the record of who was invited to price a job stays attached to the job. On a public bid that record is also the documentation of a good-faith effort to solicit widely — which is worth considerably more when it was collected automatically at the time than when it is reconstructed afterwards.

The bounce log

Dashboard, under the figures — **Bounce log**Americon staff

What came back undelivered, and every address the portal has stopped writing to. Stop mailing an address here, or put one back when you know it is good again.

Invitations are sent from a real mailbox and things come back to it — addresses that no longer exist, out-of-office replies, notices from mail hosts. The portal reads that mailbox hourly and deals with most of it on its own. This screen is the part that needs a person, and it is in two halves.

Needs a look is the queue. Each row is something the portal would not act on unaided: a delivery report whose code does not prove the address is dead, an automatic reply, a notice from a host. Two buttons clear a row — Suppress stops the portal writing to that address, Dismiss takes the row off the list and changes nothing else.

Not being mailed is the list itself: every address the portal is currently holding back from, why, since when, and any note. An address here is skipped on every send, on every job.

Everything on this screen is open to any coordinator or project manager. You are the one who rang the firm and was read a new address, so you are the one who can judge whether it is good again — an approval step in front of that would only be somebody else agreeing with you a day later.

There are two ways back onto the list, because there are two ways off it, and they are not the same act. The screen offers whichever one applies to that row and never both.

A bounce is an observation about an address. Observations can be wrong — a server can refuse a perfectly good mailbox for a week — so clearing one needs nothing but your knowing better. An unsubscribe is a person's decision, and the only thing that reverses it is that person asking. The note is required there because the note *is* the consent record: it is what answers "why is this firm being mailed again after opting out?" eighteen months later, when nobody remembers the phone call.

Refresh reads the mailbox immediately instead of waiting for the hour. It will not run twice within a minute, and if another read is already going it says so rather than appearing to do nothing. The line beside it always says how long ago the mailbox was last checked.

How a reply reaches the job

Happens automatically; nothing to pressAmericon staff

Every invitation carries a reply address unique to that job and that firm, so a contractor pressing Reply lands on the right record without anybody sorting mail.

Contractors never sign in and never upload anything. They reply to the invitation from their own email, the way they would to any other message, and the portal does the filing.

That works because each invitation is sent with its own reply address — something like bid-1487-a3f9c1d2e0@bidding.americonconstructionco.com. The part after bid- names the job, and the code after it is a signature tying the address to that one firm. When a reply arrives, the portal already knows which record it belongs to.

Each invitation also carries a second address, on the same job and the same firm, behind the Send your bid button: offer-1487-a3f9c1d2e0@. That is the only difference between the two, and it is what lets the portal tell a bid from a question before anybody here has read either.

1. The portal reads the bid mailbox every few minutes.
2. It works out which job the message is about — from the reply address, from the invitation it is answering, or from the sender being invited to exactly one open job.
3. The message appears under Correspondence on that job's invitation record.
4. The project manager and coordinator are emailed within minutes that something arrived, with a link that opens the reply to it — addressed to the firm and threaded under their message.
5. Straight after, a second pass goes back for anything attached and puts it under Offers received.

The Correspondence panel

The project editor's Mail section, and a project's invitation recordAmericon staff

Everything that arrived about this job, newest first, with a button to say what each message was.

The panel lists what came in: who from, when, the subject, and the opening lines. It is the body of the project editor's Mail section, and it appears again on the invitation record above the list of invited firms — one panel drawn in two places, so marking a message in one marks it in the other.

The sender's signature — their title, phone numbers and address — is kept with the message but shown apart from it, so the opening lines are what they wrote and a reply quotes only that. On the mailbox screen the signature is folded under the message, where their phone number is one click away.

On the invitation record it sits above the list of firms because it is the part with a deadline on it — an unanswered question stops being answerable when the job closes.

Click the subject to open the whole exchange with that firm about this job — their messages and everything typed back to them, in order, with what we wrote in full — and the rest of the correspondence with them on other jobs underneath it. A row here is one line of a conversation, and one line is how a question gets answered twice, or answered against something we never promised.

It is in two sections, and they have opposite handling rules. Waiting for somebody is everything nobody has replied to or acknowledged. Settled, and bids collecting is everything dealt with, plus the bids, which are meant to sit there sealed until the bid date.

A message marked Sent as a bid arrived at the address behind the Send your bid button in the invitation, so the contractor has said what it is. That sorts it into the collecting section — it does not mark a receipt, and the buttons are still there to be pressed.

Each message has two columns to fill in, and they are two different facts. What it is — Bid or Question — records what the message was. Dealt with records that somebody has answered it, and that is the column the waiting list runs on.

• Bid also marks the bid receipt against that firm on the record below, so the two can never disagree. That press is the acknowledgement: a confirmed bid is settled and sits sealed with the others.
• Question says what it is and nothing more. It stays listed as waiting until somebody deals with it.
• Reply writes back from the portal and records the reply for you, with your name and the date on the message.
• Acknowledge is for the times you rang them, answered from your own mail, or read it and found nothing to answer — an out-of-office, a change of address. It records who pressed it and when, and Reopen takes it back.
• Undo, under a marked message, takes back what it was said to be. Undoing a Bid also takes back the receipt it recorded on the firm's row, and the message goes back to waiting.

The line under a message says how many attachments came with it. Until the second pass has been back for them it says not fetched yet, and while the count came from only the top of the message it says at least. Both stop hedging once the whole message has been read.

Under the table, mail that named no job is offered on every project's panel. This is about this job files it here; Not for us takes it off the queue for everybody, which is the answer for a hosting notice or a mailing list that would otherwise be read past on every job.

Waiting for an answer

Dashboard, the Waiting for an answer tile; and See every job on any Correspondence panelAmericon staff

Everything nobody has dealt with, across every open job, with the ones closing soonest at the top — and under it, every trade with nobody on it.

A job's own Correspondence panel tells you what is waiting on that job. It cannot tell you what is waiting on the job nobody opened today, and that is the one that costs a question. This screen is the same list run across every job that is open or closed within the last three weeks.

It is sorted by how much time is left, not by when anything arrived. A question that came in this morning on a job closing tomorrow sits above one from last week on a job closing in May.

Three kinds of row appear, and nothing else:

• Not replied to or acknowledged — mail that arrived without saying it was a bid, and nobody has dealt with it. Anything might be in it, including a bid somebody sent by pressing Reply, so it waits here rather than in the pile that is left sealed.
• A question, not answered — somebody has read it and said what it is, and nobody has replied to it or acknowledged it yet.
• Sent as a bid, nobody has checked it — it came in through the Send your bid button, so it is collecting as a bid, and no person has confirmed that. It appears here a day after it arrived, or straight away if the job is about to close.

A row leaves this list in exactly three ways: a reply goes to the firm from the portal, somebody presses Acknowledge on the message, or the message is confirmed as a bid. Nothing else clears it, so an empty list means every message has been dealt with by a named person.

Bids that arrived normally and that somebody has confirmed are not here. This is a list of what is owed; a screen that also listed every bid would be a screen with nothing to clear, and the four rows that mattered would go down with it.

The document count is shown on each row. A message nobody has read, carrying four documents, on a job closing this afternoon is what a bid sent by pressing Reply looks like from the outside — open that one first.

Click anywhere on a row to open that message on its job’s Who has been invited record, with the row you clicked marked. The job name and Open the job go to the same place, so ctrl-click or the middle button opens it in a new tab and you keep the list. Reply is the one link that goes somewhere else — straight to writing back to that firm.

Under the messages is a second table: trades with nobody on them, across the same jobs. A trade nobody was invited for is a task with a deadline just as a question is, and until now it showed only as a banner on that job's own invitation screen — the job nobody opened this week is exactly where it hid. Each row says which of the three states it is in and lands where the fix is: Choose firms opens the invitation picker already filtered to that trade; See who went quiet opens the record where the silent firms are listed. The invited-but-quiet state joins the table only inside the last three days before the bid date.

What you are emailed, and when

Your inbox — within minutes when a contractor writes, and at five every dayAmericon staff

A contractor writing to a job emails you at once. Everything else still open on your jobs comes in one summary at the end of the day, and stays in it until dealt with.

Two kinds of email, and the difference between them is one question: does somebody owe a reply before the bid closes?

The five o'clock email is headed Still open on your jobs, and that is exactly what it is. It is not a list of what happened today; it is a list of what is still not dealt with, recomputed from the portal at the moment it is sent. A question nobody answered is in tomorrow's email too, and the day after, until it is answered. That repetition is the point — it is what makes it impossible for something to slip through unnoticed.

It comes in sections, most urgent first:

• Waiting for your reply — questions on your jobs nobody has replied to or acknowledged.
• Mail that named no job — messages the portal could not place on any job. This section goes to everyone, because there is no job to route it by, and a question on nobody's record is the one most likely to be answered too late.
• Bids to confirm — mail that arrived as a bid and no person has confirmed is one.
• Trades with nobody on them — the coverage check, across your jobs.
• Closing within two days and Closed — bids not recorded.
• Since yesterday — who said they are bidding, who passed and why, who took the drawings. This is the one section that is news rather than a task, and it is told once.

Every line is a link to the thing itself. A question opens the reply box, already addressed to the firm and threaded under what they wrote. A trade nobody was invited for opens the invitation picker filtered to that trade. A bid to confirm opens the record scrolled to that bid. Nothing lands you on a job's front page and leaves you to find the item again.

A day with nothing open on your jobs sends nothing. The subject line carries the counts — *3 to answer, 1 trade uncovered* — so you can tell from the inbox whether tonight's needs opening.

Mail that did not name a job

The "Mail that named no job" screen — from Sort all unplaced mail on any Correspondence panel, the foot of Waiting for an answer, the Bid mailbox screen, or the end-of-day summaryAmericon staff

A contractor writing fresh rather than replying gives the portal nothing to file on, so it waits on a screen for somebody to say which job it is about.

Most mail names its own job. Some does not: a firm writing from scratch, an estimator forwarding from an address nobody invited, somebody asking to be added to a bid list. The portal declines to guess, which is the right answer and a useless one on its own — so it goes on a screen instead.

The screen has no tile of its own. It is reached from wherever the count is shown: Sort all unplaced mail on any project's Correspondence panel, the warning at the foot of Waiting for an answer, the Waiting to be placed row on the Bid mailbox screen, and the Mail that named no job section of the end-of-day summary, which goes to everybody for exactly this reason.

Each waiting message shows a longer excerpt than the invitation record does, because the job here is to work out which project it is about, and that is often settled by a sentence in the third paragraph. The sender's signature is folded under it, labelled with what it holds — usually the phone number to ring them on.

• Attach to a job files it on that job's Correspondence panel, and goes back for its attachments.
• Not for us removes it from this list only.
• Never queue refuses that sender from now on, so their next message never reaches the list at all.

Most of what piles up here needs the same one-word answer — a hosting notice, a mailing list, a night's worth of spam. Tick the boxes down the left and one Not for us clears the lot; shift-click ticks a whole run at once, and the bar at the bottom says how many are chosen before you press anything.

Use Never queue for the mail that keeps coming back — a hosting notice, a mailing list, a newsletter every Tuesday. Each of those arrives as a brand new message, so taking them off the list one at a time never catches the next one. The picker beside the button offers the sender's address or everyone at their domain; pick the domain for a list that writes from no-reply@ one week and news@ the next. Anything of theirs already waiting is cleared in the same press.

What is being refused is listed at the foot of the screen, with how many messages each rule has turned away and when it last did. Queue it again ends a rule — though mail that arrived while it was in force does not come back, because the portal has already read past it.

A message you have refused stays refused. The portal never deletes mail, so it goes on reading past that message in the mailbox for ever — it just stops offering it to you again.

The same waiting mail is offered on every job's Correspondence panel, with Sort all unplaced mail leading to the full list. That is deliberate: somebody reading one job's post is the person most likely to recognise a message about it, and a queue reachable from one screen only is a queue that gets emptied once. Both buttons are there too — This is about this job, and Not for us for the ones that are about no job at all.

Offers received

On a project's invitation record, under CorrespondenceAmericon staff

One row per firm that has bid, with a document count. Click the firm to read their whole offer.

The panel answers one question at a glance: who has bid, and how much came with them. The filenames are not here on purpose — forty firms with three documents each would make every row three lines tall and push the worklist off the bottom of the page. Click a firm to see them.

A firm appears here for one of two reasons: somebody pressed Bid on their message under Correspondence, or the contractor sent it through the Send your bid button in their invitation. The second kind is marked not checked yet, and counted separately above the table, because nobody here has looked at it and no receipt is recorded against the firm.

Rows needing attention are marked down the left edge, and a summary above the table counts them, so a job with one firm in trouble does not need reading cell by cell to find it.

Comparing bids side by side

From the Offers panel — "Compare these bids side by side"Americon staff

Every bid on the job in one table, with what disagrees marked beside each number. It does not rank them or recommend one.

One row per firm, lowest first, with the firms nobody has priced yet at the bottom. Type each bid amount in once and it stays on the job — which is the spreadsheet that currently gets rebuilt by hand for every job and then lives in somebody's Downloads folder.

Amounts can be typed however the PDF wrote them. $487,300, 487300.00 and 487,300 are the same bid. Anything the portal cannot read as an amount is refused and said so, with what you typed still in front of you — it will never quietly store a guess at what "call for pricing" meant.

Bids are grouped by trade. A job here carries one invitation list across every trade it needs, so the electricians, the painters and the concrete subs are each their own table with their own low-to-high range — an electrician at $480,000 and a painter at $22,000 are never in one column, and the outlier check only ever compares a firm with the others in its trade. Which trade a firm is under comes from the contact directory; a firm invited by hand that was never a contact appears under Not classified under a trade rather than vanishing. A firm the directory files under two of the job’s trades appears under both, because the portal records what a firm does, not which package they bid.

The right-hand column names what does not add up on each row, in a few words so a row stays one line tall — hover any of them for the full sentence. They are words rather than scores, because a percentage is not something anybody can act on:

Rows carrying a flag are marked down the left edge and counted above the table, so a job with two rows in trouble is found by scanning an edge rather than reading every cell.

Download as a spreadsheet takes every figure on the job — including the unconfirmed ones, with a Confirmed column saying which is which — as a CSV. Amounts are written as plain numbers so the column adds up in Excel rather than landing as text.

The invitation record carries the counts beside the link — how many are priced, how many are waiting to be confirmed, how many need a look — so you can see a figure has come in without opening this screen. Nothing emails you about a stated figure. On a job with forty bidders that would be forty messages about something needing no action, and a prompt nobody can act on is one people learn to scroll past.

A number nobody here has stood behind is drawn dashed, with a Confirm button instead of Save and *firm’s figure* beside it, and is kept out of the low/high spread until somebody presses it. Today those come from the firms themselves — see below. A future version will also read amounts out of the documents, and they will arrive on this same footing.

Contractors can state their own figure. At the foot of the project page, below the plan files, an invited firm can type their base bid, tick the addenda they priced, answer In / Not included against the scope lines for their trade, and name anything major they excluded. The figure arrives here pre-filled and unconfirmed, so the work becomes reading and agreeing rather than reading and retyping. It is never adopted on its own — a screen an award comes off must not be writable by a party to the award.

Once bidding is over, the job is awarded from here. Press Award on the winning row of each trade; the panel above the tables records it and offers the notices — see *Awarding the job*.

Levelling: comparing bids that priced different things

From the tabulation — "Level these bids against a scope baseline"Americon staff

The lowest bid is often the firm that left something out. Levelling prices the gaps back in so the totals can honestly be compared.

Two subs quote the same package. One is $100,000 and excludes the fire alarm; the other is $110,000 and includes it. The tabulation puts the first one at the top, and it is the more expensive bid. Levelling is what fixes that — it is the standard practice, and every bid-comparison product in the industry is built around it.

There is one sheet per trade, chosen from the row of links at the top. The electrical baseline is a different list from the painting baseline, and a firm only ever appears on the sheet for a trade the directory says they do — so the painter is never marked ? on Fire alarm, and never carries a plug for work that was not their package.

The sheet has what the contract documents require down the side, and the firms across the top. For each line you say what that firm did about it: In, Out, or ? if their proposal does not say and nobody has decided yet.

The usual lines for a trade are kept between jobs. Under the add form, "Add the 6 usual lines for Electricians" puts the trade’s saved lines on this baseline in one press, and "Keep these lines as the usual ones" saves this baseline as that trade’s template for the next job. Labels only — an estimate is this job’s, and a template that carried last job’s $18,000 would put last job’s number into this job’s adjusted column before anybody had thought about it.

Firms answer these lines themselves. Once a baseline exists, an invited firm’s own bid form on the project page lists the lines for their trade with In / Not included beside each. What they tick is what their cell here starts as, marked their answer — the way a Procore or BuildingConnected sheet fills from the sub’s bid form. Change a cell and yours wins; the cell then says they said Out (or In) under it, and the tabulation flags the row so the disagreement is settled by an email before award rather than a dispute after it. Pressing Save on a column changes nothing about cells you did not move — their ticks are never silently turned into your checks.

The estimate for a line is typed once, on the line itself — "Fire alarm, $18,000" — not once per firm. Every firm that excluded it is adjusted by that same figure, and correcting it corrects every column at once. Typing it per firm would be eight chances to write a different number for the same work, and a sheet where two firms’ fire alarm allowances differ for no reason is one you cannot defend in a review.

Once anything on a job has been levelled, the tabulation gains an Adjusted column, sorts by it instead of by the submitted total, and shows both ranges in the summary. Until then nothing changes — a job with no scope baseline levels to exactly what was submitted, which is the right answer for a job nobody has levelled.

• A job carries at most 40 scope lines. That is a limit on what anybody will realistically fill in, not on how detailed a package can be — a half-finished sheet reads as authoritative and is built on blanks.
• Removing a line removes every firm’s answer to it, because those answers are to a question that no longer exists.
• The free-text "anything major you have excluded" from a contractor’s form is still shown under their column as a prompt and is never matched onto lines: "No FA" and "Fire alarm by others" are the same exclusion written two ways, and a computer matching those would move money on a guess. The tick boxes on their form exist so nothing has to be matched.

Awarding the job, and telling the bidders

On the tabulation, once bidding is overAmericon staff

Press Award on the winning firm’s row. Then, when you are ready, one press sends the winner their notice and thanks every other firm that priced.

Once the bid date has passed — or the bid was closed by hand — every row on the tabulation gains an Award button, and an Award panel appears above the tables. One winner per trade: the electrical goes to one firm and the painting to another, each pressed on its own table. A job with no trades has one.

Recording the award is one press and sends nothing. It is a fact about the job — the panel shows who, when and by whom, and a firm’s record in the directory gains "Awarded 2 of those jobs". Withdraw on the panel takes it back; nothing here is a one-way door except the notices.

The notices are the second press, and they are offered rather than sent automatically, because you may have reasons to hold them: a subcontract not yet signed, a second trade still undecided, a winner who should hear it by phone first. Open Tell the bidders and both messages are already written:

"Priced" means a recorded amount or documents that arrived. A firm that said it was bidding and sent nothing, or that declined, is not thanked for a bid it did not make. Firms that unsubscribed from portal mail are named on the panel so somebody rings them — they are not quietly dropped from a count.

Why the regret at all? A subcontractor who prices three jobs and never hears back stops pricing the fourth. It is the cheapest goodwill in the industry, every bid platform sends it, and this is what keeps the directory full of firms that answer.

Anything the directory holds against the winner that has lapsed — an expired certificate, no W-9 on file — is printed under their name on the panel at the moment the subcontract is about to be written. It never blocks the award.

Addenda on the tabulation

The Addenda column of the tabulation, on a job that has issued oneAmericon staff

Record which addenda each firm’s bid form acknowledges, by number. A bid that is short of one is flagged, and you decide on the row — waive it or set the bid aside — with a reason that goes on the record.

The column appears only on a job that has issued at least one addendum. On every other job there is nothing to acknowledge and no column.

Each row says what that bid acknowledges and on whose word:

Record what the bid form says with the tick boxes on the row and press Record, with the proposal open. The press is the assertion: pressing Record with nothing ticked records that the form acknowledges none, which is a real answer and a different one from never having looked. Pressing Record on an unchanged set writes nothing.

A bid short of an issued addendum is flagged — Addendum 3 not acknowledged — in the same column as every other thing that does not add up. It is not a rejection. It is the question, and the row offers the two answers, each of which needs a sentence of reason:

• Waive — immaterial to this bid. The addendum did not touch what this firm priced: it revised the electrical sheets and this is the painting package. The bid stands, the flag clears, and the reason is on the record with your name.
• Set aside — non-responsive. The addendum changed what this firm priced, and their number does not reflect it. The bid is marked and cannot be awarded; the reason is on the record with your name, and it is what the firm is told and what a protest reads.

A firm set aside is told, from the row. Once a bid is set aside, Tell the firm opens a notice already written: which addenda the bid does not acknowledge and what each changed, the reason you recorded, the project manager by name and "reply to this message" — never a staff address, because replies route to the bid address and land on the record — and a thank-you. It never states an amount. Edit it if you like and press Send — it goes through the same per-firm route as any message from the invitation record, so it lands on the mail log with its delivery outcome and the words are kept on the project. The row then reads *Firm told Sep 17* with your name, and the spreadsheet says so too.

• It is offered, not automatic. You may want to telephone first. But the notice is the record, and a firm that is never told cannot raise a question inside the protest window — which is worse for everybody.
• One notice per decision. Reopen the decision and set the bid aside again, and the notice is offered again.
• A firm that was never invited, or whose address unsubscribed or bounced, cannot be written to from here; the row says so instead of offering a form that would refuse. Telephone them.
• The reason you type into a set-aside is what the firm reads. Write it as a sentence to them.

Both decisions can be reopened from the row. A waiver covers only the addenda that were missing when it was made: issue Addendum 4 afterwards and the question is asked again, because it is a different question. Reopening a set-aside the firm has already been told about says so on screen — nothing here can unsend the letter, so tell them it is under review again.

A firm’s flag is only raised where there is a bid to be short — a recorded amount, or documents that arrived. A firm that said it was bidding and sent nothing has no bid form to be missing anything from.

The spreadsheet download carries two columns for this — Addenda acknowledged, with whose word it is on, and Responsiveness, with the decision and its reason — so the file stands on its own in a bid protest without the screen.

Why some bids can never be read automatically

Beside a document on the offer screen, when it appliesAmericon staff

A bid that was scanned rather than printed to PDF is a picture. Its numbers cannot be pulled out of it without somebody reading them.

A proposal printed to PDF out of Accubid, ConEst, Bluebeam, Excel or Word carries its text inside it, and a computer can read that text exactly. A proposal somebody signed and ran through the copier is a photograph of a page — the numbers are there for a human eye and nothing else.

The portal checks which kind each PDF is as it arrives, and says so beside the ones it could not read. It says nothing beside the ones it could, because every ordinary PDF wearing a "this one is fine" label would be a line of text per row carrying no information.

It matters because it is being counted. Whether it is worth building an automatic reader at all depends on how many of the bids Americon actually receives are scans, and nobody has ever measured that. Every document that arrives adds to the tally, and the answer decides whether that work happens.

Who can open a bid, and when

Enforced everywhere bid documents appearAmericon staff

Before the bid date, only the project manager and coordinator assigned to the job can open a bid, and every open is logged.

A sealed price from a subcontractor is not something the rest of the office is entitled to read while the job is still bidding. The portal enforces that rather than trusting to habit.

Colleagues who are sealed out still see that a firm answered and how many documents arrived. They cannot open them, and the offer screen shows them nothing at all rather than a refusal — a refusal would confirm which firm bid which job, which is the fact being withheld.

The documents a contractor sends

On the offer screen, under each messageAmericon staff

Drawings, schedules and anything else attached to a bid, stored against the job and downloadable from the message they came with.

Documents are listed under the message they arrived with, so a covering note and the drawings it refers to stay together. Each shows its type, its name as the contractor saved it, and its size.

They are stored outside the public part of the site and served only through a link that checks who is asking. A link copied out of the address bar and sent to somebody else does not work for them.

• PDFs and images open in the browser. Everything else downloads.
• Signature logos and other images that are part of how a message looks are not stored as documents — otherwise a plan set of four drawings would show as seven files.
• If a message carried more than the portal stored, it says so, and the whole message is still in the mailbox.

What "contained, never scanned" means

Said on every offer screenAmericon staff

Nothing a contractor sends is scanned for malware. It is contained so this site cannot run it — which is not the same as safe.

There is no virus scanner here, and there is not going to be one. The free scanning services keep and share what is submitted to them, and a competitor's sealed bid is not ours to hand over.

So the portal makes a smaller claim, and it is one it can keep. Contained means:

• The directory the files live in refuses direct web requests, three different ways over.
• Nothing is ever written to disk under a name a web server would execute, whatever the contractor called the file.
• Everything is handed to you as a download, except PDFs and images whose contents agree with their name.
• The contents are inspected, and anything that disagrees with the filename is flagged next to the download rather than in a footnote.

How long bids are kept

Runs nightly; nothing to pressAmericon staff

Bid documents are deleted from this server three years after the bid date. The record, the tabulation figures, and the original emails in the mailbox are all kept.

Three years after a job's bid date, the documents sent for it are deleted from the server. The counted-off date is the bid date, not when the file arrived, so a late question answered a fortnight afterwards belongs to the same bid as the pricing.

What survives is the record: that Dutchman Mechanical sent four documents on 14 August 2026, and what they were called. That is worth keeping for as long as the job is. The files themselves are not.

The figures on the bid tabulation are kept, and are not swept. A tabulation is a business record — what each firm bid on a job Americon ran — and it is a handful of numbers rather than a plan set. It is the thing somebody comes back to years later when a job is disputed or a trade is being priced again, and it would be the wrong half to throw away.

• A job with no bid date is never swept — there is nothing to count three years from, and deleting on a guess cannot be undone.
• Deleting a project deletes its bidders' documents with it, immediately.

Is bid mail arriving?

Dashboard, under the figures — **Bid mailbox**Americon staff

Answers one question: whether the mailbox contractors reply into is being read at all. Not for reading your mail — that is on the job record and the worklist.

Your correspondence is on the job's Correspondence panel and on Waiting for an answer, and the schedule keeps both current. There is nothing to press to see it, and you should never have to.

This screen is for the different question, the one those screens cannot answer: *is mail arriving at all, or has the mailbox been silent since eleven?* On a bid afternoon that is worth being able to check without asking anybody.

Check now reads the mailbox immediately. It will not run twice within a minute, and if a read is already going it says so instead of appearing to do nothing.

The stage-by-stage buttons for taking the pipeline apart are not here. They are a diagnosis rather than a piece of work, and they stay on the administrator's page — see Americon Bid Mailbox.

Opening your invitation

The button in your invitation emailBidding contractors

The link in your invitation is the only address that opens a private project. If you lose it, you can have it sent again from the portal.

Use the View project and plan documents button in the invitation email. It opens the project page directly; there is nothing to sign into.

Deleted the email, or the link no longer opens? The page you land on offers Send my invitation again. Enter the address the invitation was sent to and it goes back to that address within a few minutes. Check the spam folder before asking a second time.

Invite links stop working 30 days after the bid deadline. Past that, nothing can be resent — contact the coordinator named in your invitation.

Telling us you are not bidding

The “Will you be bidding?” panel in your invitationBidding contractors

Passing on one job is not the same as unsubscribing. Use “Not this one” and you stay on the list for future work.

Every invitation carries a Will you be bidding? panel, just under the button that opens the plan documents. It holds two answers: Yes, we are bidding and Not this one. Either takes one tap, there is nothing to fill in and nothing to sign into, and either can be changed later by tapping again.

Saying you are not bidding tells the project manager to stop chasing you on this job. It does nothing else:

• You stay on the invitation list and will hear about the next job.
• You are not unsubscribed from anything.
• You can change your mind — open the invitation again and tap the other answer.

Saying you are bidding means the project manager knows to expect a number from you, and that you are told first if the drawings or the deadline move.

The project page

Where the invitation link takes youBidding contractors

Everything about the bid on one page: deadline with its time zone, location, schedule, who to contact, and the plan documents.

The page carries, in order:

• Bid due — the deadline, with its time zone spelled out. Read that abbreviation: a 2:00 PM Chicago deadline is 1:00 PM in Denver.
• Location — city and state.
• Estimated start and completion — when shown, the expected construction window.
• Scope of work — when shown, what is actually being bid, in Americon's own words. Not every project carries one; where it does, it is the fastest way to tell whether the job is yours before opening a set of drawings.
• Contacts — the Americon project manager and coordinator by name, and one Email the project team button. Their own addresses are not printed: the button is the route that reaches both of them and lands on the job.
• Plan files — the drawings and bid documents, with revision labels where they carry them.
• Tell us your number — at the very end, and only when you opened the page from your own invitation link: an optional form for your base bid and what it includes. See Telling us your number.

Being asked who you are

Project page, above the plan files, on your first visitBidding contractors

Name, company and email, asked once. It is how we reach you if the drawings are revised or the bid date moves. You can skip it.

Before the plan files, you are asked for your name, your company and an email address. It is asked once per project and takes a few seconds.

It exists for one reason: if the drawings are revised or the bid date moves, this is how we reach you. Without it there is no way to tell you, and the ordinary result is a bid priced off a superseded sheet.

The address is used for notifications about this project and nothing else. Every message carries an unsubscribe link.

Downloading the plans

Project page, Plan filesBidding contractors

Press Open on any file to view or download it, or use Download all for the whole set as one ZIP.

Each file shows its name, type and size. Press Open on a row to view it in a new tab or download it.

Download all packages the entire set into a single ZIP. A large drawing set takes a minute to compress — leave the tab open while it works.

Where a file carries a revision label — "Rev B", "Addendum 2" — check it against what you already have. That label is the only thing that distinguishes a reissued sheet from the one you downloaded last week.

Add to my calendar

Project page, beside the bid deadlineBidding contractors

Puts this one bid deadline into Outlook, Apple Calendar or Google Calendar. No account needed.

Downloads a standard calendar entry for this bid's deadline, which your calendar application will offer to add.

The entry is stored as a fixed point in time, so it shows correctly in your own time zone rather than in ours.

Asking a question

Reply to your invitation, or the project page under ContactsBidding contractors

Reply to your invitation email, or use Email the project team on the project page. Either reaches the people running the job and is recorded against it.

Reply to the invitation email you were sent. There is no address to copy down, no form and no login, and attachments come through as normal.

If you no longer have the invitation, the project page carries Email the project team under the two names. It opens your own email with the address already filled in and goes to the same place.

Either way the message is filed against that project and the firm it came from, so it reaches the project manager and the coordinator without depending on one person being at their desk. That is why neither of their own addresses is printed anywhere: a message sent to one of them directly is one nobody else on the job can see.

There is no message form on the site and no account to sign into — everything goes through ordinary email.

Sending your bid

The “Send your bid” button in your invitation emailBidding contractors

Press it, attach your proposal, send. It opens your own email — there is nothing to log into and nothing to upload.

Send your bid in the invitation opens a new message in your own email program, addressed for you. Attach your proposal and anything that goes with it, and send it the way you would send anything else.

It arrives against the right job and the right firm on its own, and stays sealed until the bid date — only the project manager and coordinator running that job can open it before then.

That address belongs to this job and your firm, and it does not expire. Keep it, write it down, or forward the invitation to whoever is pricing the work — it still files correctly weeks later, from any of your addresses.

Sent your bid by replying instead? Nothing is lost and nothing needs re-sending. It reaches the same job; somebody here just opens it to see what it was.

Telling us your number

At the foot of the project page, below the plan files — "Tell us your number"Bidding contractors

Optional. Type your base bid so the estimator can start comparing as soon as your email lands — it does not replace sending the bid.

At the foot of the project page, after the plan files, there is a short form headed Tell us your number: your base bid, which addenda you priced, whether each of the listed scope items is in your price, and anything major you have excluded. Filling it in is optional and takes about a minute. It is at the end of the page rather than the top because the first visit, weeks out, is for the drawings; on bid day you come back on the same link, and the number goes where you have just finished pricing from.

The scope items are the lines the estimator will compare every bid against. Answering In or Not included for each is how your number gets compared fairly with everybody else’s — a bid that leaves out the fire alarm is not the lowest bid, and saying so here means nobody has to guess from your exclusions page. Leave a line blank if you are not sure; a blank is recorded as nothing, not as either answer.

It does not replace sending your bid, and it is not a bid on its own. Your proposal is still the document, sent by email, exactly as before. This just means the estimator can begin comparing the moment your email arrives instead of waiting until somebody has opened every attachment on the job.

• Write the amount however you like — 487300, $487,300 and 487,300.00 are all read the same way.
• You can send it again at any time before the deadline; the newer figure replaces the older one.
• The addenda are ticked from the list this job actually issued, so there is no question of which numbering anybody means.

Nobody else bidding this job ever sees it. Before the bid date only the project manager and coordinator on the job can, which is the same rule that keeps your proposal sealed.

Addenda: what to do when one arrives

In the invitation and every update about the job — "Addenda issued"Bidding contractors

List every addendum by number on your bid form. A bid that leaves one out can be set aside — that is standard bidding practice, and the number is what makes it checkable.

An addendum is a numbered change to the bid documents — revised sheets, a clarification, a moved bid date. Every message about the job lists the ones issued so far: Addendum 1, Addendum 2, and so on, each with a line saying what changed and the files it carried. The numbering is the portal’s, so there is never a question of which "Rev B" anybody means.

Acknowledge every addendum by number on your bid form. That is the acknowledgment that counts, exactly as it is on any bid you have ever submitted. A bid that omits one may be set aside as non-responsive, and the project manager is asked to decide about it before the award — so a missed number costs you the job, not a phone call.

• Each addendum in the message has a Confirm you received this addendum link. One press, no login. It tells the project manager it reached you, which is what keeps them from ringing round on bid day. It does not replace listing it on your bid form.
• The *Tell us your number* form on the project page asks which addenda you priced, ticked from the same numbered list. That is a help to the estimator — and still not a substitute for your bid form.
• If an addendum moves the bid date, the message says so and the project page shows the new deadline.

The account list

User ManagementAmericon staff

Every portal account with its role, last sign-in and status. Search by name or email, or filter by role or status.

Shows name, email, role, last sign-in and whether the account is active or suspended, with a Manage link on each row. Your own account is marked *you*.

Search matches names, usernames and email addresses. The role and status dropdowns narrow further, and Show all accounts resets everything.

Choosing a role

User Management, when creating or editing an accountAmericon staff

Project Manager and Project Coordinator currently hold identical permissions. Pick the one that describes the job, not the access.

Both staff roles can create, edit and delete projects, see private projects, manage plan files, send invites and export lists. The role records what someone is responsible for; it does not currently restrict what the software allows.

Administrator adds account management and access to the WordPress admin. Keep the number of administrators small — and never let it reach zero, since only an administrator can create another one.

Adding an account

User Management, Add an accountAmericon staff

Name, email, username and role. Leave "Email a set-password link" ticked so the person chooses their own password.

All five fields are required. Two are worth care:

• Email — used for sign-in, password resets and every message the portal sends them. It has to be one they actually read.
• Username — first initial plus last name, e.g. jsmith. It cannot be changed afterwards.

Leave Email a set-password link ticked. The account is created with no password and cannot be signed into until somebody sets one, so the email is the way in. Untick it only when creating an account ahead of time — and remember that somebody then has to trigger that email later.

That later trigger is Send a set-password email on the account's own page, under Access. It is also the answer when the first email was lost, or when somebody has forgotten a password and cannot get the reset link to arrive: each one sent replaces any sent before it. A suspended account refuses it until the account is restored.

Suspend, or delete?

User Management, editing an accountAmericon staff

Suspend when somebody leaves — sign-in stops, everything they did stays on the record. Delete only removes an account created by mistake.

Almost always suspend.

Suspending signs the person out everywhere at once, and takes an optional reason — *"Left the company, 8 Aug"* — that is shown on the account afterwards. A suspended account shows a Suspended badge in the list and on its own page, along with who suspended it and when. Restore access puts it back with its original role, and their old password still works.

Deleting asks two things before it will act: which account inherits every project the person created, and a tick against Yes, permanently delete. There is no trash for accounts, so the tick is the confirmation.

Last sign-in

User Management, in the account listAmericon staff

When this account was last used. Hover for the exact date and time.

Shown as a relative time — "3 days ago" — with the exact timestamp available on hover.

An account that has never been used reads as such, which usually means the set-password email was never acted on.

Americon Site Setup

WordPress admin, Tools → Americon Site SetupAmericon staff

Checks that every page the portal needs exists at the right address, and creates any that are missing.

The plugins provide the features; they do not provide the pages. This tool lists every page the portal needs, what each one holds, and whether it is correct — then creates or repairs the missing ones in a single press.

Run it on a fresh install, after moving hosts, or whenever a header button leads to a "not found" page.

Afterwards: open Settings → Permalinks and press Save once, then run the self-check.

Americon Self Check

WordPress admin, Tools → Americon Self CheckAmericon staff

Fifty-odd checks of the things that fail silently — file protection, mail, both mailboxes, the schedules, roles — each saying plainly what is wrong rather than that something is.

Confirms the things that fail without a symptom. Every row names one check, says whether it passed, and when it did not, says what to do about it — several link straight into the matching entry in this manual.

Run it after any deployment or plugin change. A section at the foot, What this cannot check, lists what it cannot see from inside the site — the list is honest about its own limits so that a green page is not read as more than it is.

Being told when the site breaks

Arrives by email; nothing to openAmericon staff

The self-check runs nightly and mails administrators when it stops passing, plus a weekly all-clear. Silence on a Monday means something is wrong with the mail, not that everything is fine.

The checks described above were, for a long time, run only when somebody happened to open the page. So the portal could detect a dead schedule, a broken mail login, or plan files that had stopped being protected — and would sit on that discovery until an administrator went looking. The way anyone found out was a contractor ringing up.

Two things close that gap, and they are deliberately independent of each other.

• The nightly digest. The self-check runs on a schedule. Administrators are mailed when it starts failing, when what is failing changes, and once a week regardless — so a working alarm proves itself weekly rather than only at the moment you need it.
• The heartbeat. A scheduled task outside the site calls a URL on it. This exists because the digest runs on the site's own scheduler, and a scheduler that has died cannot report its own death — every scheduled job stops, no invitation leaves the queue, no reminder goes out, and the only symptom is silence.

Americon Bid Mailbox

WordPress admin, Tools → Americon Bid MailboxAmericon staff

Where an administrator proves the bid mailbox can be read, and watches a message land rather than waiting on a tick. Reading it once is also what releases held invitations.

The mailbox contractors reply into reads itself every few minutes, and a message that arrives with drawings on it has them fetched and the job team told within seconds of being read. None of that needs anybody on this page. It is here for two moments: proving the mailbox can be read at all, and standing over it when something has not turned up.

The table is one question in seven parts, read top to bottom — is it configured, when did it last run, when does each stage run next, what did that run do, how were the messages matched to jobs, what is still waiting, and how much room the stored documents have left.

Three buttons run the stages by hand: Read the mailbox now, Fetch waiting documents now, and Send any notices owed. The first is the one to reach for — a read that files anything asks the other two to run immediately after, so one press usually does all three.

A read that fails prints the mail server's own words rather than a summary of them. "Could not read the mailbox" is equally true of a wrong password, a wrong host, a firewall and an expired certificate, and only the server can say which of those it was.

The mailbox invitations come back to

WordPress admin, Tools → Americon Mailbox — the queue itself is on the dashboardAmericon staff

Invitations are sent from a real mailbox, and things come back to it. The portal reads it hourly, sets aside the addresses proven dead, and raises anything a person wrote for somebody to answer.

Four kinds of thing arrive at the address invitations are sent from: reports that a message could not be delivered, out-of-office replies, notices from the mail host, and replies from contractors who pressed Reply instead of using the links in the email. The last of those is a person asking a question about a live bid.

The portal opens that mailbox every hour and reads fifty messages at a time, so a mailbox that has been filling for a year is worked through steadily instead of in one run.

Nothing is deleted that was not understood. A message the portal cannot identify is assumed to be somebody writing to us, and tidying those away as it passed would mean pointing an automated process at a mailbox holding months of correspondence and destroying it on the first run.

The queue itself -- what is waiting, and the buttons to clear it -- is on the dashboard under Bounce log, where coordinators can reach it. This page is the mailbox behind it: whether it can be signed into, when it was last read, and what that read did.

It lists the same rows, each saying which of these it is — Somebody wrote to us, Automatic reply, Failed, but not proof the address is dead, and so on. Read the mailbox now checks immediately rather than waiting for the hour. Dismiss clears a row once it has been dealt with, and Stop mailing it sets the address aside where a reply makes clear it should be.

How plan files are protected

Applies to every plan file on the siteAmericon staff

Plan files are stored outside the public folder and served only after the project's visibility and access code have been checked.

Plan files are not ordinary media. They are stored outside the publicly readable uploads folder, and every request for one is checked against the project's visibility and access code before a single byte is sent.

That matters because gating the *page* is not enough on its own — a file at a public address can be fetched directly by anyone who has, or guesses, its URL, and no amount of page-level permission checking ever runs.

The one-time repair tools

WordPress admin, under Tools — the pages not listed aboveAmericon staff

Each repairs records written before a fix, shows what it would change before changing anything, and reports nothing left to do once it has run. None of them is part of normal use.

Besides the pages above, Tools carries a handful of pages that exist to repair data written before a particular defect was fixed. They share three rules: each reports before it writes, each refuses to guess where the evidence is missing, and each is safe to run again — a second run finds nothing left to do and says so.

Keyboard shortcuts

Anywhere on the site — press ? for the list

Press ? to see the shortcuts available on the page you are on. "g" then a letter goes somewhere; "/" jumps to the search box.

Deliberately few, and following the conventions already used by Gmail, GitHub and Linear.

gd

Go to the calendar dashboard

gp

Go to public projects

gv

Go to private projects (staff)

c

Create a project (staff)

/

Jump to the search box

?

Show the shortcut list

For a chord, press g, release it, then press the second letter within about a second.

How deadlines are described

Everywhere a bid date appears

Deadlines always carry their time zone, and "closing soon" means inside 72 hours everywhere on the site.

• Closing soon means within 72 hours of the deadline. The calendar's amber markers, the quick filter and the reminder emails all use that same number.
• Closing today means before midnight tonight, in the site's own time zone.
• Closing this week means within the next seven days.
• Time zone is always printed beside a deadline. A bid deadline is contractual, and "2:00 PM" means different things in Chicago and Denver.

Calendar entries you download or subscribe to are published as fixed points in time, so your own calendar converts them to your clock correctly.

Public and private, exactly

Set per project

Public projects are on the calendar, in the public list and in the subscribable feed. Private projects are on none of them and need the access code.

A project created before visibility existed and never edited counts as public. A project whose status is anything other than Open is kept off the public feed until somebody decides it belongs there.

Glossary

Terms used throughout the portal

The words this site uses for things, and what each one means here specifically.