You priced what you could see. The mechanical schedule said the units come furnished with disconnect. It did not say integral, it did not say who mounts it, and there was nothing in Division 26 to tell you either way.
The cut sheets showed up later. Now there are five sidewall exhaust fans at 480 volt three phase, two smaller exhaust fans, and four motorized louvers that were not in what you priced. The PM says they were in the Scope of Work. The Scope of Work is dated the day after you bid.
Or it is the model number. The heat strip configuration determined an additional tap, the electrical schedule did not carry that information, and you ate the Polaris lugs across quite a few units. There was no dispute and no one to bill. You found out at closeout, by yourself.
The remedy you adopted afterward was to look up every model in the schedule. That works on a quiet week. It is the first thing to go when there are eight packages due.
Short term, you absorb it. The fragment was technically in the bid documents, which makes the GC a bystander rather than an adversary, and there is no one to bill.
Longer term, your exclusion list keeps growing — and it only ever defends the border you can already see. The fragments that cost you are the ones you never read and therefore never excluded.
The part that does not reverse: once you sign, the documents govern. If the units are in the bid documents, too bad for the person who missed it. That is not a vendor’s framing. That is the community’s own verdict on itself.
“The note on the mechanical schedule says the units are furnished with disconnect — it does not say who mounts it, and that silence is where the money goes. Carry it or exclude it, but do not leave it alone, because silence resolves against whoever signed. Here is the language for either side, sheet and note number attached — your call which one goes in.”
What it does not do: it does not price. It produces no labor unit and no bid number — you set the number, the same as you do now. It does not decide the responsibility split; it names the ambiguity, cites it, and hands the call back to you. And it cannot read a document you were not given. If a fragment exists in no issued document at bid time, it is outside what any reader can catch, and Volt says so instead of filling the gap.
Volt returns every place outside Division 26 where the book hands work to electrical, with the section and the sentence. It reconciles a panel schedule against the mechanical, plumbing and equipment schedules and names the mismatches. It diffs revisions and reports which referenced equipment moved. It produces carry-or-exclude language you can lift into a scope letter, and a record of what a number was priced against.
The conditions: you have to give it the full manual, not just your set. It handles scanned and image-based sheets. It cannot catch a fragment that exists in no issued document at bid time — and the worst case in the record is exactly that, a governing document nobody had. You still make the pricing decision.
There is no customer catch to show you and no return figure to quote, because this is new and nobody has a year of results with it yet. What exists is the record of what this problem costs when nobody runs the cross-check, and the fact that the cross-check itself is not sold by anyone. That is why the first step is your book instead of our case study.
Run it on a book you already bid. If it does not return the fragment that got you, you have lost an hour and learned something for free.