The scenario

Meet your subcontractor. A general contractor emails them an Invitation to Bid: project name, scope, a due date, a contact. They scope it, send a confirmation back, and if they win the job, invoices start arriving from their own suppliers. When the project closes out, the GC wants one clean transmittal packet tying it all together. Today that is four separate scrambles through an inbox. Across these five tutorials, you will turn it into one pipeline that runs the same way every time.

Each step builds on the one before it, in the order the work actually happens:

You will start by building a template that reads an Invitation to Bid PDF and pulls the project name, due date, and GC contact into a case (Invitation to bid). Next you will turn those captured values into a confirmation document and compose it as a Gmail draft to send back (Bid confirmation). Then you will set up the dashboard and an automation so supplier invoices land on the right case on their own and roll up into an at-a-glance view (Tracking invoices). Finally you will use source tabs and a computed total to bind everything into a single transmittal packet (Building the transmittal).

The two ideas under all of this are the template (a reusable blueprint: what data to read, where it lands, how the output is named) and the case (one unit of work, here one bid, holding its files, extracted data, and history). If those terms are new, Core concepts defines them, and What is Document Blueprint? walks the same intake idea end to end.

All you need to start is an account with one workspace, which every account gets automatically. Keep a sample Invitation to Bid PDF handy to follow along with real values rather than placeholders.

Next: build the capture template in Invitation to bid.