Your working capital is sitting with government buyers

The pattern repeats in every firm that bids regularly. A tender closes in March. The award is decided in May. The deposit, say a demand draft lodged with the tender inviting authority, becomes refundable on the terms the notice sets, and then it sits.

Nobody in the firm is at fault. The estimator has moved to the next notice. Accounts has no reference for a receipt that was never issued. The partner who signed the draft remembers it in November, when the bank balance will not support a fourth bid.

The ledger removes the part that fails, which is remembering. Every deposit carries the tender reference it belongs to, the mode it was furnished in (demand draft, online payment, bank guarantee, eBG), and the refund trigger taken from the event the notice ties release to. Rows move from HELD to DUE to CHASE on their own.

The panel above is the surface itself: two rows overdue, the total sitting against them, and a letter to the tender inviting authority already drafted with the clause and the date the refund fell due. You sign it and send it. That one letter, sent in month three rather than month eleven, is most of the recovery. The sequence it relies on is set out in the EMD refund process guide.

The ceiling on concurrent bidding is set by cash, not by capacity to execute. Two limits apply and most bidders check only the first.

The notice may impose a bid capacity formula, which weighs your works turnover against work in hand. That is a paperwork test and you can compute it in advance with the bid capacity calculator, reading the multiplier and the number of years off the clause rather than assuming them.

The second limit is your own, and no notice mentions it: the deposits and guarantees already out of the door. The register makes it readable. Capital locked is the sum of every live deposit plus margin money held against every live guarantee. Against that sits the expected release schedule, what should come back and in which month, derived from each row's refund trigger. Headroom is the difference.

A firm that can state its headroom stops taking bid or no bid decisions on instinct and starts taking them on a number, which is the argument in EMD and working capital planning and the input the bid or no bid framework is missing without it. The uncomfortable version is common: the headroom exists, and it is sitting overdue with three different departments.

Start with where the numbers come from, because that is the step most trackers skip and ask you to type in yourself.

The public list feeds do not publish the deposit. Avsar indexes live notices from NIC's Central Public Procurement Portal, the state portals NIC aggregates, and GeM, re-read every minute, but the EMD figure, the modes the buyer will accept and the event release is tied to all sit inside the tender document. The same engine behind eligibility reads them out of that document and cites the clause and page it read them from, so you can check the figure before you commit the money rather than after.

When you mark a bid as submitted, a row opens with what you actually furnished, which is not always the notice figure. A micro or small enterprise claiming exemption furnishes nothing, and the row records that rather than pretending a deposit exists.

Ageing runs from the refund trigger, not from the payment date. A deposit lodged in January against a bid that opens in April is zero days old until April, then it starts counting. That distinction is the difference between a list of old payments and a list of claims. Only the second is worth writing a letter about.

A guarantee that has expired is not a guarantee that has been released, and the gap between the two is where firms lose money quietly for years.

The bank holds margin money under a lien until the lien is lifted, and it lifts the lien on the strength of the buyer's written release, not on the calendar. Commission is charged for as long as the instrument is live. Together those two facts mean a guarantee against a contract you finished long ago can still be costing cash every quarter and still be eating the limits you need for the next contract.

The register carries, for each guarantee, the face value, the issuing bank, the expiry date, the end of the defect liability period read off your contract, and commission paid to date. The item fires at the end of the defect liability period, because that is when the release can begin, not when the instrument lapses.

What the release actually involves is in performance bank guarantee, the choice of instrument in bank guarantee versus FDR versus surety bond, and the carrying cost on your own bank's rates in the bank guarantee cost calculator. Retention held by the buyer on the same contract sits in the same ledger, and retention money explains what the buyer is holding and why.

It never touches funds. Deposits are paid by you to the buyer through the portal, guarantees are issued by your bank, and this is a register and a chasing tool. It never submits a bid and never holds your digital signature certificate, by design, here as on every other module. It is a private platform and is not affiliated with any government department.

It does not send the chase letter either. The letter is drafted against the tender reference, quoting the clause and the date release fell due, and then it stops. A letter to a tender inviting authority is a statement by your firm, signed by your authorised signatory. Software should not be making statements on your behalf.

It will not assume a rate. EMD percentages, retention, performance guarantee percentages and liquidated damages vary by department and by contract, so each one is an input read from the notice or from your signed contract, never a default. For the same reason it does not assert a single refund deadline that holds everywhere.

It also keeps exemption and discretion apart. Exemption from EMD and tender fee for micro and small enterprises under the Public Procurement Policy for Micro and Small Enterprises 2012 is an exemption, claimed on production of a current Udyam certificate. Relaxation of prior turnover and prior experience under the General Financial Rules 2017 is something the buyer may grant. The first is treated as certain, the second as pending.

Setup is one row per deposit you already have out, and it is bank statement work rather than analysis. Each row wants the tender reference, the amount, the mode it was furnished in, the date it left, and the event the notice ties release to. A firm carrying a dozen open deposits gets through it in an afternoon. After that, rows open themselves as you mark bids submitted, so the ledger stays current without anyone maintaining a habit. The guarantee book takes longer, because the defect liability end date has to come off each contract, and that means opening the document.

It earns its place if you run several bids at once, if your deposits sit with more than a handful of authorities, or if you are still carrying guarantees on contracts that closed a while back. It does not, if you bid one tender a quarter. For that, a spreadsheet and the free EMD calculator, which runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere, is the honest answer.

A micro or small enterprise exempt from EMD on most bids still carries security deposits, retention and performance guarantees, so the guarantee half still applies. Discovery and award intelligence tell you what to bid for and at what price. This tells you how many at a time.