The BuildingConnected Bid Board alternative when the process is yours.

Almost nobody leaves Bid Board Pro because intake is bad. Intake is what it is excellent at: invitations from a network of 1.5 million builders land on one board, forwarded invites from your inbox land next to them, and the calendar is honest. Teams start looking around when they try to make the board describe how their own shop actually works, and find that the vocabulary belongs to Autodesk.

Statuses are the first wall. Bid Board Pro ships ten: Undecided, Accepted, Declined, Submitted, Won, Lost, and four Other variants. Every estimating shop has stages between submitted and won, and most boards make you pretend they do not exist, so the real stages get buried in tags and comments where no report can reach them. Pursuit lets you add as many statuses as you want with your own labels, colors, and order, and each one maps to an outcome, so win rate math stays correct no matter how many stages you add.

Custom fields are the second. Union or open shop. Bond required. Prevailing wage. Who referred it. Those are the fields that decide whether you bid, and Bid Board Pro has no way to define one; the workarounds are tags and internal comments, which are free text, so they cannot be required, validated, filtered cleanly, or totaled in a report. In practice the real data ends up back in a spreadsheet. In Pursuit you create the fields, and they appear on the board, drive filters and saved views, feed reports, and can set checklist due dates.

Then reporting, which is where the first two failures compound. Bid Board Pro gives you five templates plus custom reports assembled from a set column list: project size, submitted value, estimating hours, client, job name, location. If the number you want is not a column Autodesk shipped, it is not a report. Pursuit builds the report from a plain-English description, saves it, and re-runs it against live data, and because your own fields are real fields, they are available to slice by.

Last, the checklist. Bids are rarely lost on price. They are lost on the addendum nobody acknowledged and the quote nobody chased. Bid Board Pro has no checklist before submission; you can assign a coworker, leave a comment, and set a follow-up date after the bid goes out, which is the wrong end of the job. Pursuit lets you define the standard work your company runs on every pursuit, with each item calculating its own due date from the bid date or one of your custom fields plus an offset, assigning itself by rule, reminding on its own, and surfacing overdue items in a digest.

And underneath all of it, Pursuit reads the documents. Ask the plans, specs, or soils report a question and the answer comes back with the page cited. Contract review flags risk and produces redlines, specification requirements get extracted and checked for conflicts, and BidScreen Cloud takeoff is on the same platform, so quantities live with the bid rather than in a folder.

How to migrate

1. Decide first whether this is a migration or an addition. Many teams keep the free BuildingConnected Bid Board for network intake and run the pursuit itself in Pursuit; the invitation still arrives where the GCs send it.
2. Export your bid history from Bid Board Pro to Excel while the subscription is live. Autodesk lets you filter, total, and export, and that history is the baseline your hit rate is measured against.
3. Create a free Pursuit account and write down your real pipeline stages before importing anything. This is the step that was impossible before, so it is worth doing deliberately.
4. Build the custom fields that decide whether you bid: union or open shop, bond required, prevailing wage, referral source. Make the ones that gate a decision required.
5. Define the checklist your company runs on every pursuit, and give each item a due date offset from the bid date or one of your new fields.
6. Connect Outlook or Gmail so GC and vendor threads log to the right bid instead of one person's inbox.
7. Upload the plan sets and specs for the bids you are pricing now, and on the Intelligence plan sanity-check the document Q&A against a bid you know cold.
8. Record outcomes with reasons from the first bid day. Hit rate by customer, project type, and estimator accumulates from there.