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Tenders overview

A tender is a procurement process: the buying group invites suppliers to answer a set of questions (an Invitation To Tender, or ITT) by a deadline, compares the responses, and converts the winning response into a deal.

The process

  1. Build the tender — its details, question set, invited suppliers, deal team, and deadline.
  2. Issue the ITT — a generated PDF letter placed in each supplier's document folder.
  3. Respond — invited suppliers answer the questions and upload supporting documents, then mark their response complete.
  4. Compare the responses (a generated answers report), or compare against an existing deal.
  5. Award — accept the winning supplier and create a deal from their response (the tender answers are copied into the new deal's terms).

See Running a tender for the steps and Tenders for the model, statuses, and per-supplier document folders.

How tenders relate to other features

  • Tenders reuse the survey form-field plumbing for their questions.
  • Suppliers see only the tenders they were invited to.
  • The award step produces a deal; the deal is then edited and run like any other.
  • Tenders appear on a category's CMT page under the Tender tab.