You get three drywall quotes. One is a PDF, one is an email, one is a text message with a number and a "plus tax." Leveling them means building a spreadsheet and reading every exclusion line twice.
Chantro does the typing part and leaves the judging to you.
Sending the request
On the Price step you send an RFQ to the subs you want. The email goes out with a Scope of Work PDF attached, drafted from your estimate, and each recipient is tracked, so you can see who has been sent what.
Email goes through the platform's email pipeline. It needs production sending to be approved on your deployment, so ask us if it is not turning up.
Parsing a reply
When a quote comes back, paste the text into Chantro and choose "Parse with AI." It fills in:
- the amount
- what is included
- what is excluded
- the lead time
The rule is simple. It is told never to guess a price. When the amount is unclear, it leaves the field blank for you and says why. Check each parsed amount against the quote: a blank you can see is better than a wrong number you trust.
Parsing works from pasted text. Chantro does not read your inbox and file quotes into estimates for you.
Leveling
Say Marcus has two drywall bids for Southgate Medical Office: Ironleaf Drywall & Acoustics and Cedar Brake Interiors. With two or more bids on a trade, "Level bids" builds a matrix.
| Row | Ironleaf | Cedar Brake |
|---|---|---|
| Base amount | entered or parsed | entered or parsed |
| Included | listed | listed |
| Excluded | listed, flagged if the other includes it | listed |
| Leveled total | adjusted | adjusted |
The matrix shows leveled totals, flags where one bid leaves out something another carries, and a recommendation.
The recommendation is advice
Leveling is advisory. It shows that one sub's low number leaves out, say, taping above the ceiling line, which is exactly the thing you would have caught on a slow read. It does not pick your sub. You know who showed up on time last year and who did not, and no matrix does.
A good routine
- Send the RFQ with the same scope to every sub.
- Paste each reply as it arrives and parse it.
- Fix any blank amounts yourself.
- Level when you have two or more.
- Read the flags, call the sub with the odd exclusion, and update the bid.
- Pick, and carry the price into your build-up.
What stays with you
- Choosing the sub.
- Reading the actual quote before you rely on the parsed fields. Parsing saves the typing, not the reading.
- Anything the sub said on the phone and never wrote down.
After the sub is picked
Pricing continues on the same step with overhead, bond, escalation and margin. Chantro can suggest pricing with its reasoning, and shows adjustments as signed amounts you can accept or change. Before you submit, a bid check lists findings such as an uncosted activity, a trade with no bid, an empty materials list or missing assumptions, so the holes show up before the owner finds them.
Credits
Parsing and suggestions use credits. How many you have included depends on your plan.
Why bother
The spreadsheet was never the point. The point was seeing, in one place, what each sub is really offering. The matrix gets you there with less typing, and the flags tell you where to look first.
A small example
Ironleaf comes in lower on the Southgate ceilings, but its quote excludes the soffits. Cedar Brake is a little higher and carries them. On a spreadsheet that difference hides in a notes column. In the matrix it is a flag on the Ironleaf column, and the leveled totals move closer together. Marcus calls Ironleaf, asks what soffits would cost, and puts the real number in. That call is the work. The matrix just tells him to make it.
