Tender & Bid Register

What this tool does

CM8-67 is a working register of tenders and bids. You log each opportunity when you first see it, track it through preparation and submission to its outcome, and record what it was worth and what it cost you to bid. The tool then answers the questions a bid review actually asks: how much is live and when is it due, what proportion of decided bids do we win — by count and by value, because the two are rarely the same number — how much have we spent bidding, how much of that went on bids we lost, and why do we lose.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request, so client names, bid values and the honest reasons you lost stay on the computer you are using. A bid register is one of the most commercially sensitive documents a business holds — treat any export accordingly.

What to log, and when

Log an opportunity the day you identify it, not the day you decide to bid. The register is more useful when it also holds the tenders you looked at and declined: the bid/no-bid decision is itself a discipline, and a register showing you bid everything that moves is telling you the qualification step is missing.

One row is one opportunity. Keep the bid value on a consistent basis — whole contract term is the usual choice for tenders. A register mixing annual values with three-year totals produces a win rate by value that means nothing. Write your basis in the report notes and stay with it.

The estimated cost to bid is your estimate of what the submission costs you: the days of writing, estimating and management time at a sensible rate, plus any hard costs — bonds, consultants, site visits, printing. It is spent whether you win or lose, which is exactly why it belongs in the register. Enter it when you commit to bidding and correct it afterwards if the reality was very different.

Statuses, from first sight to outcome

• Status — What it means — Counts in win rates?
• Evaluating — Deciding whether to bid at all — No — live
• Preparing — You are in; the submission is being written — No — live
• Submitted — It has gone in; awaiting the outcome — No — live
• Shortlisted — Through to a final stage, interview or presentation — No — live
• Won — Contract awarded to you — Yes
• Lost — Awarded to someone else — Yes
• Declined to bid — You chose not to submit — Never
• Cancelled — The buyer cancelled or withdrew the procurement — Never

The first four statuses are live — they appear in the live bids tile and table. The outcome date is the day you learned the result, or made the decision to decline; leave it blank while a bid is live. The optional win probability is your own honest reading at the last review — it is recorded for the bid review conversation, and it is deliberately not used to weight any figure in this tool, so an optimistic guess cannot inflate anything.

Deadlines and the warning window

Every bid carries a submission deadline, and the register counts down to it:

For a bid that has not yet been submitted — evaluating or preparing — the count is flagged amber once it is inside the deadline warning days set on the Settings tab (7 by default), and red once the deadline has passed. A red flag on a preparing bid means the deadline has been missed with nothing submitted: either an extension exists, or the honest move is to close the row as declined and record what went wrong. Bids already submitted are not flagged — their deadline being in the past is normal.

The live bids table sorts by soonest deadline first, so the top of the table is always the next thing that needs work.

Win rates — and why decided bids only

Both win rates are calculated from decided bids only: those that ended won or lost. Bids you declined and procurements the buyer cancelled are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator, everywhere in this tool — tiles, charts and tables alike.

The exclusion is not a technicality. A declined bid was never tested against a competitor, so counting it as a loss punishes good qualification; counting it as anything else invents a result that never happened. A cancelled procurement had no winner at all. If you fold either into the rate you get a number that changes with your appetite for bidding rather than your ability to win — and the whole point of a win rate is the second thing.

The two rates diverge whenever the bids you win are a different size from the bids you lose, which is usual. In the sample register the rate by count is 40.0 % but the rate by value is 31.0 %: two wins out of five decided bids, but the losses were bigger than the wins. Winning the small work and losing the large is a pattern worth knowing about early, and only the value rate shows it. When nothing has been decided yet, both rates read "—" — a win rate with an empty denominator is not zero, it is undefined, and this tool refuses to print a confident number where none exists. Treat any rate resting on fewer than ten or so decided bids as an anecdote, not a statistic.

The cost of bidding

Bidding is expensive, and the expense is invisible in most accounts because it is mostly people's time. The register totals your estimates two ways:

The second figure is the one that changes behaviour. It is the money already spent on submissions that returned nothing, and it is the strongest argument for a harder bid/no-bid gate: every bid you decline that you would have lost moves its cost out of that figure. Read it alongside the win rate by count — a low win rate with a high lost-bid cost means the qualification meeting, not the bid writing, is where improvement is cheapest.

These are totals of your own estimates, entered per bid. The tool does not turn them into a cost per win or a break-even bid count, because with a small number of decided bids those figures are noise dressed as insight.

Loss reasons and debriefs

Every lost bid must carry a reason — the tool insists, and "unknown — no feedback received" is a valid answer that is itself worth tracking. If a large share of your lost value sits against "unknown", the fix costs nothing: ask for the debrief. Most public-sector buyers are required to offer one, and most private buyers will give one to a polite request.

Be suspicious of your own register when most losses read "price". Price is what buyers say when the conversation is easier that way, and what bid teams record when the real reason stings. A quality score two points short, a missing case study, an incumbent's relationship — each points at a different fix, and none of them is "cut the price". The loss reasons chart weights reasons by the value lost, so one big loss shows up as big, which is how it should read at a review.

Sector analysis

The sector summary shows, for each sector you have typed: bids logged, bids decided, won and lost counts, win rate by count on decided bids, value won and cost of bidding. Sectors group on the text exactly as entered, so keep the spelling consistent — "Local government" and "Local Govt" become two sectors.

Read it for concentration as much as for rates. Most small businesses win in one or two sectors and break even at best elsewhere; the summary shows where your evidence, references and reputation actually convert. A sector showing "— (none decided)" has no win rate yet, and the dash is deliberate: a rate from zero decided bids is not a number.

What this tool cannot do

It does not know when a bid was actually submitted — the monthly submissions chart uses the deadline month as the closest available proxy, which is stated on the chart. It treats every value as being in the single currency set on the Settings tab and does not handle exchange rates. It does not model frameworks with call-off values, lots within one tender, joint bids with revenue shares, or the difference between contract value and the revenue you will actually recognise. Bid costs are your estimates, not timesheet data. And it holds no documents — it is a register, not a bid library.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, the six headline figures, all four charts, the live bids table, the sector summary, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the whole register — filtered to one status or one loss reason, the report looks exactly like a complete one once it is a PDF on somebody else's desk.

Saving your work

Bids, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work, including days to deadline, and covers every filtered record rather than only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool calculates from what you enter and nothing else. It cannot verify a bid value, a cost estimate, a deadline or a loss reason, and every figure downstream inherits whatever went in. Win rates are quoted on decided bids only, and with few decided bids they move sharply with a single result.

Procurement law, standstill periods, challenge rights and debrief obligations differ by country and by procurement regime. This is an internal record-keeping and review aid, not legal advice, not a procurement compliance tool, and not an accounting record.