Bid boards typically pull in the same core data any bid opportunity would have: project title, owner, location, bid date, and a link back to the actual documents in that agency's plan room — the underlying documents themselves usually still live wherever the issuing agency posted them. Coverage and data quality vary widely between services, and no single bid board captures every opportunity in a given market, which is why many companies subscribe to more than one, or supplement bid boards with direct agency relationships and manual portal checks. Because a bid board's core value is breadth — surfacing that a project exists at all — it generally stops short of telling a contractor whether the project is actually worth pursuing; that qualification work (scope fit, geography, bonding, competition) still has to happen after the lead is found. Finding that a project exists is the easy part; understanding whether it's actually worth pursuing requires reading what's inside it. Nonlinear is built for that second step — taking the projects a bid board (or any other discovery source) surfaces and reading the actual documents to determine relevance, scope, and risk, rather than stopping at the headline.
Knowledge Base
What is a bid board (project lead database)?
A bid board is a commercial database — usually a subscription service — that aggregates public and private construction bid opportunities from many agencies and procurement portals into one searchable feed, so a contractor doesn't have to check each agency's site individually.
