How an HPD emergency-repair contractor fills each bid package in about 30 seconds
A small, family-run general contractor in Brooklyn has one core line of business: winning and delivering work orders from HPD's Emergency Repair Program, New York City's program for urgent repairs in privately owned buildings: doors, locks, hinges, carpentry, roofing and painting. It holds MWBE status and is on HPD's published pre-qualified lists for carpentry and roofing. Every job arrives as the same flat bid package, the Division of Emergency Operations' Invitation to Bid / Open Market Order (OMO). Typed, stamped and signed by hand, each bid took minutes of focused typing. With Instafill.ai it fills in about 30 seconds.
At a glance
- Customer A Brooklyn MWBE general contractor (name withheld)
- Program NYC HPD Emergency Repair Program
- Document HPD Invitation to Bid / Open Market Order (OMO) package, one per job
- Team Accounting, project management, buildings coordination and the owner
-
Results
~30 s to fill a full bid package
372 form fields in a package, at most
~3 weeks from the first call to live bids - Form categories Construction bid forms, Government procurement forms
The challenge
HPD emails a bid package for each job, a flat PDF with no fillable fields, and someone on the team rebuilt it from scratch every time. They retyped the company boilerplate (contractor name, address, phone, fax, owner, "% to be subcontracted: N/A") on a form that never changes but could not be saved. They pulled the bid price out of an Excel sheet, and copied the scope of work off the government's page into the Remarks boxes, often twice, because HPD's own staff duplicate lines by hand. On long jobs they shrank the font from 9 to 8 to 6 pt so the scope would fit.
They also read material names out of the prose, such as a "vintage-style passage lock", and entered them in the Materials column with size and quantity. They ticked the same boxes every time: Trade = GC, Permit Required = No, Sidewalk Bridge = No. They stamped two pages with the current date and signed in 2–3 places, by hand, on every bid. And they were racing the clock: emergency work goes to whoever turns a clean bid around first.
The same handful of people handle every bid, and there is no one whose job is paperwork, so paperwork was the bottleneck. The contractor found Instafill.ai on its own and uploaded HPD bid PDFs several times before ever speaking to the Instafill.ai team. It set two conditions: the stored signature and stamp must not be visible to every user on the account, and the team would type the bid price and materials themselves rather than have AI guess them, while everything that can be read from the government's PDF would be automatic.
The solution
Instafill.ai built the workflow during a two-call onboarding, then handed it over. The OMO package was turned into one reusable template with flat-to-fillable conversion: the sample data stripped, real fields added, field descriptions written and the formatting set. The team no longer uploads a new PDF per job.
Every field that never changes is pre-filled with the company's details as saved field values, which the AI never touches and the contractor can edit at any time. To bid a job, the team opens the fill link, starts a new package, attaches the government's OMO PDF and adds a short note with the bid price, location, procedures and materials. Instafill.ai reads the attached file and the typed note together. From the OMO, the AI summarizes the scope of work into Remarks, appends the mandatory compliance line, removes HPD's duplicated entries and lifts the material name out of the scope into the Materials column.
The stamp lands on both pages that need it, with the current date. The contractor uploaded their signature once, and it is placed on every generated document, isolated to their workspace and can be repositioned. Every value can still be changed on the review screen before download, so a rare exception is a quick fix rather than a redo.
The results
| By hand | With Instafill.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-bid input | Rebuild the whole package | Attach the OMO and a few lines of notes |
| Company data | Retyped every time | Saved once, never retyped |
| Scope and Remarks | Copied, sometimes twice, font shrunk to fit | Summarized, de-duplicated, compliance line added |
| Materials | Read out of the prose by hand | Lifted into the Materials column |
| Stamp and date | Stamped by hand | Stamped automatically with the current date |
| Signature | Signed in 2–3 places on every bid | Stored once, placed automatically |
| Time per bid | Minutes of focused typing | About 30 seconds |
The workflow is live and runs the contractor's real OMO bids. A full package, up to 372 form fields, fills in about half a minute. The one defect they hit, a signature rotating on a landscape page, was traced and fixed within days and confirmed with them. From the first call to live bids took about three weeks, most of it spent waiting on sample packages and polishing rather than building.
