Budget tracker on a tablet died mid bid review and I had to hand write 40 line items

Henry Campbell · 2026-10-17T22:45:04.368692+00:00

Last Thursday I was at the kitchen table at 10pm doing a bid review for a 40 line item job down in Tucson when the old tablet running my cost tracker just froze up, wouldn't even turn off. I had maybe 20 minutes before my estimator needed the numbers back. So I grabbed a legal pad and a pen and wrote out every line by hand straight from the paper takeoff. Turns out the tablet was set to auto update and choked on it, so I turned off auto updates and set it to manual only. I lost about 30 minutes, but the weird part is I caught two math errors in the sheet while writing it all out again. Now I keep a printed copy of the gut check totals next to the tablet, which sounds dumb but it paid off. Has anyone else had a tablet or laptop die on them right before a bid goes out, and how do you back up the numbers so a crash doesn't wipe you out?

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Budget tracker on a tablet died mid bid review and I had to hand write 40 line items | Construction Software - HW Forums