Pursuit Puts Every Bid on One Board You Can Drag

Ask three people in the same office where a bid stands and you can get three answers. The estimator knows it went out Tuesday. The PM thinks it is still pending. Somebody is looking at a spreadsheet tab that stopped getting updated in April.

Bid status is the cheapest information in your company to keep current and the easiest to let rot. Nobody sets out to lose track of it. Updating a status just costs a few clicks, and a few clicks is plenty of friction when you have a bid due Thursday.

So we made the update take one drag. The Pipeline board is a new report in Pursuit: every bid in your organization, laid out in columns by status, in your column order.

The two-minute version

Where to find it

Pipeline board is the new entry, right under Pipeline report. It comes with the Pro+ and Pro+ Intelligence plans.

Those two are not the same report, and the difference matters. The Pipeline report charts active bids only and leaves out won, lost, and no-bid. The board is the opposite. Everything is on it, because the point is to see the whole thing at once.

Every bid, in your column order

One column per bid status. Each column header carries the number of bids sitting in it and the dollar value behind them, so you can read where the work and the money are without opening anything.

Every card shows the job number and name, the customer, the bid date, the amount, and a badge for whoever it is assigned to. Column order comes from your organization's Company Defaults, so the board reads left to right the way your team already talks about a job.

Drag a card, and it asks you why

Grab a card, drop it in the next column, and the bid status changes. That is the whole interaction, and it is the same change as editing the status on the project itself. Every move is logged as a note on the project timeline, so six months from now you can see when a bid went from Submitted to Won, and who moved it.

Any status can require a reason when a bid lands on it. Turn Required change reason on and dropping a card there opens a short form instead of quietly changing the status. In the board above, Won and Lost both have it on.

Pick a reason, add detail if you have it, and set the date. Leave the date blank and it uses today. Backdating is there on purpose, because bids get logged late and your reports should reflect when the job was actually decided, not when somebody got around to writing it down.

That is also the part that pays you back later. A win rate tells you how often you win. A year of win and loss reasons tells you why, which is the number you can actually do something about.

Then Pursuit offers to tell the rest of the company.

Six statuses ship built in. Most companies need more.

Pending, Submitted, Won, Lost, Bid Deadline Missed, and Not Bidding cover the outcomes. They do not cover how a lot of estimators actually think about a pipeline, which is usually some version of how far out the job is.

You build those yourself. Go to Organization settings, Company Defaults, then Bid Workflow.

Four things happen in that table. Each status maps to exactly one pipeline outcome, so a custom status like Likely-to-Award still counts as open work in every report. The toggle turns Required change reason on or off per status. The arrows set the order, and top to bottom here becomes left to right on the board and in every status picker. The eye hides a status you do not use.

Two things worth knowing before you start renaming things. Defaults apply to new projects, and any individual project can override them. And hiding a status pulls it out of the picker without touching projects that already use it, so nothing gets rewritten behind your back.

This one came from a customer

We did not build the Pipeline board off a roadmap. A customer mentioned that the program they used before Pursuit had a Kanban pipeline, and that dragging a card was how their team thought about moving a bid along. That was the whole brief. It was a fair ask, so we built it.

If something you relied on somewhere else is missing here, tell us. That is usually how these get made.

Try it on this week's bids

The Pipeline board is live in Pursuit now, under Reports. If your statuses are still the six built-ins, spend five minutes in Company Defaults first and add the ones your team says out loud. The board is only as useful as the columns are honest. See what else Pursuit does.

New to this side of the business? Bid management in construction walks through the whole process, from invite to award.