A bid package goes out on Tuesday. By Friday, four of the eleven invited subcontractors have asked the same question about the same detail. Two are working from a drawing that was superseded last week. One has priced a scope that overlaps another trade by about fifteen metres of wall.
None of that appears in the bid tabulation. All of it is sitting in somebody’s inbox.
This is the unglamorous middle of preconstruction. Not the estimate, not the award, but the weeks in between, when a general contractor and a dozen trade partners try to agree on what is actually being built. The cost shows up later, as a scope gap found during buyout or a change order in month three.
The drawings and the bid live apart. The estimator works in a takeoff environment with the models and the sheets. The bid goes out through a separate platform. When a drawing is revised, nothing reconciles which version a price was based on.
Bids arrive in shapes you cannot compare. One is a lump sum in a PDF. One itemizes by assembly. One buries its exclusions in a cover letter. Normalizing them is manual work under deadline, which is where errors enter.
Clarifications are answered privately. An answer given to one bidder by email is invisible to the other ten, so they are not pricing the same job. You find out when you compare the numbers.
None of these are problems with bidding software. They are problems with the seam between bidding and everything else.
In March 2026, Autodesk Construction Cloud was renamed Autodesk Forma, which Autodesk described as a naming change rather than a migration, with “no data migration, no disruption to existing workflows, and no changes to licensing, integrations, or project data.” (Autodesk News, 24 March 2026)
More consequentially, Autodesk brought bid management and prequalification from BuildingConnected into the Forma Preconstruction experience, so bidding sits in the same project as the drawings, the models and the quantities. Autodesk is explicit that the capability is in public beta. (Autodesk, Digital Builder)
For a Canadian contractor, one limitation matters more than any feature. Autodesk states that bidding in Preconstruction is limited to projects using the US data storage region, and to subscription types that include Forma Takeoff or Forma for Preconstruction together with BuildingConnected Pro. (Autodesk, Digital Builder) For any firm whose projects sit in a Canadian data region, or whose client contracts specify where project data resides, that is a gating question. It is a procurement and data-residency conversation, not a software one.
Two further limits. Some work stays in BuildingConnected during the beta, including network profiles, templates, contacts and bid history. And linking Forma Estimate line items to bid packages, which would let you compare subcontractor pricing against your own estimate, was presented at Autodesk University 2026 as coming soon rather than available. (Autodesk, Digital Builder)
A capability in beta is worth understanding early. It is not worth building a bid calendar around.
Bidding runs inside the project rather than beside it. Requests for proposal, bid packages and phased buyout live in the same environment as the takeoff and the estimate, with scope coverage visible rather than remembered. Messaging attaches to the package rather than to a thread in Outlook.
Custom bid forms are the quietly useful part. Defining a form at the request or package level means pricing, alternates, inclusions and exclusions come back in a consistent structure. You are comparing like with like because you asked for like in the first place, not because somebody spent Thursday night retyping PDFs into a spreadsheet.
This is the part worth repeating to your subcontractors, because it is the question they will ask.
Autodesk is clear that trade partners see no change. They keep using bid invitations, the bid board and the same submission process, and they do not need a Forma account. (Autodesk, Digital Builder)
That asymmetry is the point. Every previous attempt at preconstruction collaboration asked the trade partner to adopt something. A specialty contractor bidding eleven jobs a month for nine general contractors is not going to learn nine portals, and is right not to. The burden of change belongs with the general contractor, who is the one who benefits from the structure.
Settle data residency first. Find out where your projects are configured and what your client contracts require. If the US region is not acceptable, the whole evaluation changes shape, and that is worth knowing in week one.
Then standardize one bid form and write down your scope breakdown. Most firms have a breakdown in practice and none on paper, and an inherited one nobody has examined is how overlaps survive from job to job.
Most of the useful work here is not installation. It is deciding what a bid package is at your firm, getting the scope breakdown and the bid forms into a shape that holds up across pursuits, and being honest about which parts of a platform are ready for a live job.
SolidCAD is an engineering technology implementation partner and a Symetri company.
From drawings to quantities: improving preconstruction with Autodesk Forma Takeoff
If preconstruction coordination is where your projects lose time, start with a conversation about your current process rather than a product demonstration. SolidCAD can be reached at info@solidcad.ca.