What is it?

BidLucent is easy-to-use, web-based estimation software.  It helps contractors bid jobs more competitively by predicting how much a job is going to go over (or under) budget.  It also keeps track of customer and category trends and provides tools for evaluating employee performance.

BidLucent takes only a few minutes to learn and runs completely over the Internet - there is nothing to download or install.

How does it work?

The key to BidLucent is job history.  The software analyzes numerous characteristics of jobs completed by your company in the past in order to predict the actual costs of upcoming jobs.

To use BidLucent, simply tell it a few basic pieces of information about a job before you bid it, including what type of job it is and how much you expect it to cost.  The software will immediately tell you the likelihood of the job going over budget and how much profit it expects you to make.  Try out different bid amounts to see their corresponding profit projections.  Use this information to determine how much to bid for the job.

When you complete a job, tell BidLucent who worked on it and for how many hours, along with your actual costs.  BidLucent will factor these data into future cost predictions.

Because BidLucent maintains a history of past jobs, it also shows you important trends in your business.  For example, maybe you have a customer who always makes last minute changes, causing costs to go up.  Or maybe there is a type of job that you always overestimate costs for.  Or perhaps you have an employee who frequently takes longer than expected on certain types of jobs.  BidLucent shows you these trends and helps you adjust your bids accordingly.

Why are we making software?

The Internet is the software platform of the future.  Many of today’s popular applications (think: Facebook, Google Docs, Hotmail, etc.) are built to run in a web browser, rather than from the desktop.  The hallmark of these applications is their ease of use and the fact that the user doesn’t have to download or install anything to run them.

However, the contracting industry has been sorely neglected when it comes to web-based software.  Most software for contractors still comes on a CD, along with a huge licensing fee and a steep learning curve.  We know from experience that this software is difficult to learn, clunky to use, and downright unaffordable for many small businesses.

So, we decided to leverage our deep knowledge of the contracting industry to create a product that takes minutes to learn, is affordable, and solves a real problem that all contractors face.

I want to know more!

The best way to learn more about BidLucent is to sign up and try it out.  All registrations come with a 45 day free trial.  At the end of that period, if you want to keep using the software, you will be asked to provide payment information.

We also have a more in-depth tour of BidLucent that covers much of what was described here, along with some screenshots of the software.