The invitation to tender lands on a Tuesday. The deadline is a fortnight away. Before anyone gets near the price, there’s the questionnaire: insurance certificates, two years of accounts, the health and safety policy, the environmental policy, a modern slavery statement — the document setting out what you do to keep forced labour out of your supply chain — accident figures, training records, three references, and case studies of similar work. Your office has answered every one of these questions before. Probably last month.
Nobody prices a job on that Tuesday. That Tuesday is for finding PDFs.
The form before the price
The questionnaire has a name: a PQQ, a pre-qualification questionnaire. It’s the form a client uses to check you’re a real, solvent, insured, competent business before they spend any time reading your price. Fair enough, in principle — no client wants to award a job to a firm that folds in month two. The trouble was never the idea. The trouble is that for years every client wrote their own version, and answering dozens of different forms with the same facts became a quiet industry of its own.
The industry has fixed this. Twice.
The first fix is the Common Assessment Standard — a single industry-agreed question set put together by Build UK, the body whose members include the major contractors and clients. Instead of filling in a different form for every main contractor, you get audited once a year by a recognised assessment body — CHAS, Constructionline and Achilles are among them — and that one certificate is accepted by a long list of names you’d recognise: Balfour Beatty, Kier, Mace, HS2. Government procurement guidance now tells public sector buyers to use it too.
The second fix is for public work directly. The Procurement Act — the law that rewrote how councils, NHS trusts and government departments buy things — brought in a Central Digital Platform in February 2025. The pitch is “tell us once”: you register your core company information — accounts for your two most recent financial years, who owns and controls the business — and share it with any public buyer you bid to, instead of retyping it into every council’s portal.
Both fixes are real. Both help. If your clients accept the Common Assessment Standard and you don’t hold it, getting certified is the cheapest improvement on this page. Stop reading and do that first.
What the fixes don’t fix
Here is what I find when I look at a firm’s bid process, certificate or no certificate. The prequalification stage got easier. The tender itself did not. Past the PQQ still sit the bespoke questions: quality submissions, case studies with photographs and values, CVs of the site team, a social value answer — what the job will do for the local area — a carbon plan, references who’ll actually answer the phone. And plenty of private clients and their consultants never got the memo — they still send their own spreadsheet with their own numbering.
More to the point, the standards fixed the question paper. They did nothing about your answers. The insurance certificate is an attachment in an email from the broker, renewed in March, filed nowhere. The accident figures are in the health and safety consultant’s annual report, which one person has. The case studies live inside old tenders, in a folder called Bids, in subfolders by year, several of them named final, FINAL, and final-v3-USE-THIS.
So assembling a bid is archaeology. Someone — usually the office manager — rebuilds the same answers for the fourth time this year, slightly differently each time. That’s the real cost, and it’s also the real risk. Rebuild an answer often enough and eventually a lapsed insurance certificate or last year’s accident number goes out the door in a live submission, under your signature.
A library, not a platform
There is software sold for this problem — bid management platforms, with pipelines and dashboards and collaboration workspaces. If you employ a bid team and tender every day, they earn their keep. A mid-market firm bidding a couple of times a month doesn’t need a platform. It needs a library.
One place where every standard answer and every standard document lives exactly once, with two things attached: an owner and an expiry date. Insurance certificates flagged a month before renewal. Accident figures updated once a year, by a named person, on a set date. Case studies written up in the week the job finishes — photos, dates, value, what went wrong and how it was handled — not reconstructed from memory eighteen months later because a tender demands one. Built properly, it will also assemble the standard pack in one go and record which version of which document went into which bid, so when a question comes back six months later you know exactly what you said.
It’s small, it’s fitted, and it’s boring. It also turns a two-day scramble into an afternoon.
Where this doesn’t apply
If your work is repeat business and negotiated contracts, and you fill in a questionnaire twice a year, don’t commission anything. A tidy shared drive, a one-page checklist and an hour a quarter spent checking expiry dates will do everything I’ve just described, free. And if your bids go out clean but keep losing, the problem is the price or the work itself, and no library fixes that. Software earns its place at the point where bidding is regular, the same evidence is being rebuilt every month, and the person doing the rebuilding has better things to do. Below that line, discipline beats software.
I run audits on exactly this kind of plumbing, and I take on a handful of clients a year to build the fitted version. If your Tuesdays sound like the one at the top of this page, get in touch.