The handoff from estimate to procurement is where HVAC controls projects lose the most time. Here's how the Bidtracer and Peregrin integration eliminates that gap — and what it means for your team.
The Most Expensive Minutes in Any Controls Project
Ask any HVAC controls contractor where their projects lose the most time, and the answer almost never involves the actual work. It’s the handoffs.
Specifically: the handoff from the estimator who won the bid to the purchasing team who has to turn that estimate into real purchase orders. In most shops, this looks like:
- Estimator finishes the bid in Bidtracer
- Someone exports the bill of materials (or re-keys it into a spreadsheet)
- Purchasing opens that spreadsheet and starts hunting for prices across supplier portals
- Parts get manually grouped by supplier
- POs get created one at a time, re-typing part numbers and quantities
- Half the day is gone, and nothing has shipped yet
This is where 2–4 hours of labor per project disappears — before a single part has been ordered. For teams running 10+ projects a week, that’s 20–40 hours of procurement labor every single week spent on a workflow that shouldn’t require any labor at all.
Why the Handoff Breaks Down
The handoff isn’t broken because people are bad at their jobs. It’s broken because the systems don’t talk to each other.
Your estimating software is optimized for winning bids. It handles takeoffs, labor burden, markups, and proposal generation. It’s not designed to turn a finished estimate into purchase orders split across six different suppliers with your negotiated pricing applied.
Your supplier portals are optimized for the supplier. They want you in their interface, checking their pricing, placing their orders. They’re not designed to pull a BOM from somewhere else and automatically match, split, and route the whole thing.
The gap between those two systems is where the manual work lives. And historically, contractors have had no choice but to pay someone to bridge that gap by hand.
How the Bidtracer + Peregrin Integration Works
Peregrin integrates directly with Bidtracer so the handoff disappears. Here’s what the workflow looks like with the integration in place:
1. Estimate in Bidtracer as usual. Nothing changes about how your estimators work. They build bids, select equipment, and win projects exactly the way they do today.
2. Push the BOM to Peregrin with one click. When a project is ready to buy, the full bill of materials flows from Bidtracer into Peregrin. No spreadsheet export. No re-keying. No copy-paste.
3. Peregrin matches every line item against supplier catalogs. The platform compares each part number against catalogs from Alps Controls, Belimo, Functional Devices, BAPI, Schneider Electric, Siemens, and the rest of your supplier network. Matched parts get your tenant-specific pricing applied automatically.
4. POs are generated automatically, split by supplier. Instead of one person manually creating six separate POs for one project, Peregrin splits the order based on who should fulfill what. Your negotiated pricing, your preferred suppliers, your purchasing rules — all applied without intervention.
5. Submit, track, and reconcile in one system. POs go out through each supplier’s preferred method (portal, API, EDI, or email). Order status flows back into Peregrin automatically, so your team sees one dashboard with every order across every supplier.
What This Actually Saves You
Let’s put real numbers on it. A typical HVAC controls project currently takes 2–4 hours to move from a finished Bidtracer estimate into submitted purchase orders. Here’s the breakdown of where that time goes:
| Step | Manual Time | With Bidtracer + Peregrin |
|---|---|---|
| Exporting BOM from estimating | 10–20 min | Instant |
| Looking up pricing across portals | 45–90 min | Instant (catalogs pre-loaded) |
| Grouping parts by supplier | 15–30 min | Automatic |
| Creating individual POs | 30–60 min | Generated automatically |
| Submitting POs through supplier channels | 15–30 min | Automatic per supplier |
| Tracking and following up | Ongoing | Unified dashboard |
Total: 2–4 hours of labor per project drops to about 15 minutes of review-and-approve work.
For a team running 10 projects per week, that’s the difference between spending 20–40 hours on procurement handoffs versus 2.5 hours. At a fully-loaded purchasing rate of $38/hour, that’s roughly $36,000 to $78,000 in annual labor cost reclaimed — without adding a single person.
What It Means for Each Role
The integration doesn’t just save time in the aggregate. It changes what each role is actually doing:
- Estimators stay focused on bidding, not answering questions from purchasing about line items that didn’t translate cleanly. Their estimates flow forward intact.
- Project managers get visibility into procurement status without having to chase down purchasing or dig through email threads. One dashboard shows every PO across every project.
- Purchasing staff stop being data-entry clerks and start being strategic buyers. Their time goes into supplier negotiations, exception handling, and sourcing decisions — not manual PO creation.
- Owners and operations leaders get clean data on spend, supplier performance, and project profitability because the system captures it automatically instead of depending on someone to enter it after the fact.
Why This Partnership Matters
Bidtracer has become one of the most widely adopted estimating platforms in the HVAC controls space for a reason — it’s built specifically for contractors who need to handle complex multi-supplier bids with serious technical depth. But estimating software, no matter how good, doesn’t solve procurement.
Peregrin was built to be the procurement layer that works with the tools you already trust. Rather than asking contractors to rip out Bidtracer and adopt some all-in-one solution, we built a deep integration that lets each platform do what it does best.
That’s the theme across everything we build: work with your existing stack, not against it. Your suppliers, your estimating tools, your ERP, your team’s workflows — the goal is to unify them, not replace them.
Ready to See It?
If you’re a Bidtracer user and you’re still manually bridging the gap between estimates and purchase orders, the integration is going to feel like magic the first time you use it.
Book a demo and we’ll walk you through the full flow on your own data — from a Bidtracer estimate to submitted POs across multiple suppliers, all in one session.
Ready to streamline your procurement?
Join HVAC controls contractors who are getting early access to Peregrin and transforming how they order parts.