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Two versions of the same bid

A trucking company needed a bid for its lender while our internal estimate was still being reviewed, so I planned two documents.

A trucking company needed a construction bid for its lender. Our internal estimate was partway through review with the project architect, and the Strata subcontractor had not yet been brought in on that portion.

First, I had the architect mark up the internal working estimate in a private pass, before any version left the building. Then I planned a second, owner-facing bid that the client could submit to his lender.

What a lender needs is a finished bid. A live working estimate with internal review flags and caveats still attached is something else. Send the internal version to a bank and an unfinished-looking document may be treated as final by people with no idea what is still being checked.

The architect and I booked a same-day markup pass on the internal estimate ahead of building the lender version. A bank version and a working version are different documents, and one should never leak into the other. The point is to spare a client from seeing, or being held to, an internal process he has no part in.

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