How to Read a Tender Document in Twenty Minutes

A Notice Inviting Tender can run to two hundred pages, most of it boilerplate, with four or five clauses that decide whether you should bid at all. Reading it front to back is the wrong approach, because the disqualifying information is scattered and the boilerplate is at the front.

Here is a reading order that gets you to a bid or no-bid decision in about twenty minutes.

Minute 1 to 3: the dates

Find the bid submission closing date and time, and count backwards.

• How many working days do you have?
• Is there a pre-bid meeting, and has its date passed?
• Is there a separate query deadline, usually earlier than you expect?
• When does the document download window close?

If the closing date does not allow time to obtain a solvency certificate you do not already hold, or a document with an external dependency, the answer may already be no.

The portal's clock is the only clock that counts. See submitting an e-tender.

Minute 3 to 10: eligibility

Go straight to the eligibility criteria section. You are looking for four things:

1. Average annual turnover required, and over which years. Check against your audited figures. See how average annual turnover is calculated.
2. Similar work experience required: how many works, what value, what period, and how "similar" is defined. See what similar work actually means.
3. Registration class, where the department maintains one. See contractor registration classes.
4. Any bid capacity formula, which limits total commitments rather than single work value.

If you fail one of these and no relaxation or joint venture route is open, stop reading. This is the highest-value seven minutes in the process.

Minute 10 to 13: the money you have to put up

• EMD amount and acceptable instruments, and whether you are exempt. See EMD in tenders.
• Tender fee, and whether exempt.
• Performance guarantee percentage and duration, because that is the capital committed if you win. See performance bank guarantees.
• Retention or security deposit deducted from bills. See retention money.

Together these are the working capital the contract consumes. A contract you cannot fund is not a contract you should bid for, whatever the margin looks like.

Minute 13 to 16: how it will be evaluated

• Cover structure: single, two or three cover. See single, two and three cover bidding.
• Evaluation method: L1, QCBS or least cost. This changes what you should quote. See L1, QCBS and LCS.
• Whether a [reverse auction](/blog/reverse-auction-in-tenders) follows financial opening.
• Bid validity period, which is how long you are committing to your price. See bid validity period.

Minute 16 to 20: the clauses that bite later

Skim, but do not skip:

• Completion period and liquidated damages for delay
• Price variation, or a statement that the contract is fixed price. On a long contract with no escalation clause you are carrying commodity risk. See price variation and escalation clauses
• Payment terms and the running bill cycle. See running account bills
• Defect liability period, which sets how long your guarantee stays live

If a term in the notice is unfamiliar, the government tender glossary has the whole vocabulary in one line each.

Then, and only then, the technical specification

If everything above clears, read the scope and specification properly, because that is what you are pricing. Before it clears, reading the specification is time spent on a tender you may not be able to bid for.

Two things to do after the first read

Check for corrigenda. The document you downloaded may not be the current one. See corrigendum in a tender.

Write down your questions for the pre-bid meeting, particularly any interpretation you are relying on. An interpretation you have not confirmed is a risk you are carrying for free. See pre-bid meeting questions.

What this replaces

The habit this is meant to displace is reading the specification first because it is the interesting part, then discovering the turnover clause on day three. Why bids get technically rejected is largely a list of things a first read in this order would have caught.

Avsar reads the eligibility criteria out of the notice and checks them against your company record, citing the clause and page, so the seven-minute step happens before you open the document. See the eligibility engine or browse live tenders.