Submittal Review
How a submittal is compared clause by clause against the spec, what each verdict means, and why Bimiq never recommends Rejected.
Submittal Review takes the requirements already extracted from your specification and puts each one to the submittal, one at a time. You get a verdict per requirement with the evidence quoted, not a summary judgement on the document.
Before you start
The specification has to be in the project first, uploaded as type specification, with rule extraction finished. Submittal Review has nothing to compare against until it is. See Document types.
Then upload the submittal itself and run the review.
The four verdicts
Every requirement in the spec section gets exactly one.
| Verdict | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Complies | The submittal states something that demonstrably meets or exceeds the requirement, and Bimiq can quote it |
| Deviates | The submittal addresses the requirement and fails it, with the offending text quoted |
| Not addressed | The submittal is silent on this requirement |
| Needs review | The submittal touches the requirement, but the evidence is ambiguous, partial or unselected |
Not addressed is the normal answer
A typical cut sheet is silent on most of a spec section. That is not a failure of the review, it is the actual state of the submittal, and it is usually the most useful column on the page: it is the list of things nobody has confirmed.
Bimiq will not strain to find a match. Silence is reported as silence.
Compliance is never inferred
A product that does not state its fire rating is not_addressed, not complies. The absence of a contradiction is not evidence, and a marketing line like "meets applicable codes" does not satisfy a numeric requirement, so it comes back as needs_review.
Every complies and deviates verdict has to carry a literal quote from the submittal. If there is no quotable evidence, the verdict is downgraded rather than asserted. The same downgrade happens when the model's own confidence falls below the floor. A confident-sounding complies that you then have to disprove is worse than an honest needs_review.
Selection marks
This is the part a text-only review gets wrong.
Product data sheets are usually option tables, and the submitted configuration is whatever the subcontractor ticked, circled, highlighted or handwrote. That mark carries the entire meaning of the page, and it does not exist in the PDF's text layer.
Submittal Review reads the page visually and records which options are marked and which are not.
It follows through on the consequence: if a page lists options and none is marked, the product's value for that property is not established. The verdict is needs_review, never complies, even where one of the listed options would have satisfied the spec. An unmarked option table is an unanswered question.
The recommendation
From the verdict counts, Bimiq suggests one of the standard review actions.
| Condition | Suggested action |
|---|---|
| Any deviation | Revise and Resubmit |
| No deviations, but items not addressed or needing review | Approved as Noted |
| Everything complies | Approved |
Rejected is never suggested. Rejecting a submittal is a commercial act with schedule and contractual consequences, and it stays a human decision. You can always select it yourself.
The recommendation is a suggestion in every case. You set the action.
Stamp wording
The four actions are fixed, but what your project calls them is not, and this is a contractual matter rather than a preference.
| AIA wording | Liability-cautious wording |
|---|---|
| Approved | No Exceptions Taken |
| Approved as Noted | Make Corrections Noted |
| Revise and Resubmit | Amend and Resubmit |
| Rejected | Rejected |
Many firms' counsel forbids the word "Approved" on a stamp. AIA A201 narrows the reviewer's duty to conformance with the design concept, explicitly not to the accuracy of dimensions, quantities or installation, and architects have been held liable for having "approved" submittals that later proved defective.
Set the wording per project in the project's submittal settings. Every label in the interface and in exports resolves through that setting, so the stamp on the record matches the contract.
Cost
Submittal review is metered per page of the submittal, with a floor so a two-page cut sheet still covers its overhead. See How credits work.