Thin coverage on a single trade — only one sub quoted electrical, say — leaves an estimator exposed to a late price change, a no-show at bid time, or an uncompetitive number with no way to sanity-check it. Strong coverage, typically multiple quotes per major scope, lets an estimator pick the best combination of price and risk and still have a fallback if a sub drops out after award. Coverage gets harder on public work with tight bid windows, since subs and suppliers are often quoting the same deadline for several general contractors at once and can't always turn a quote around for every GC who asks. Chasing coverage — figuring out what needs a sub-quote in the first place, then tracking who has and hasn't responded — is one of the more repetitive, time-consuming parts of putting a bid together. Reading every scope that requires a sub-quote out of the spec sections and drawings is exactly the kind of document work Nonlinear can do up front, giving an estimator a coverage checklist to work from instead of building one by hand.
Knowledge Base
What is bid coverage?
Bid coverage is having enough qualified subcontractor and supplier quotes in hand, for every major scope of a project, to build a competitive and defensible bid rather than guessing at a price for work you can't self-perform.
