Bid Management

Bid Management covers the workflow of preparing, soliciting, receiving, comparing, and leveling subcontractor and supplier bids for construction work packages.

Browse Every Package From Bidding

The sidebar’s Operations → Bidding item opens a cross-project list of every Bid Package in your organization. It is not tied to a single revision, so it is the fastest way to answer “what needs me next”.

Search across package name, trade code, scope summary, and project name.
Filter by status — All, Draft, Issued, BidsReceived, Leveling, Recommended, SupplierAwarded. Cancelled packages are not listed here.
Read the row — package and project, status, due date, proposal count, scope-item count, lowest leveled bid (in the project’s currency), and the package’s leveling tax basis.
Sort — packages are ordered by lifecycle stage, then due date or last modified, so the most actionable work sits on top.

The list is read-only: packages are created and moved through their lifecycle inside a project’s Bidding tab or the estimation workspace’s Bid Leveling tab. Select a row to open that package’s bid-leveling matrix.

Open Bid Leveling From the Project or Estimation

Bid packages are project-level records that can remain live across estimate revisions. Open the project’s Bidding tab, or select a revision from Estimations, open its Estimation Workspace, and select Bid Leveling. Each package retains the revision and scope it was priced from, even when a later revision becomes the active baseline.

Use the workspace tab to manage bid packages and monitor open items. When the comparison needs more room, open the full bid-leveling matrix for the package.

Bid Packages

A Bid Package is a grouping of estimation modules scoped for soliciting competitive bids. Each package represents a discrete unit of work that contractors can price.

Each Bid Package includes:

Scope summary — description of the work to be bid
Modules — estimation modules with quantity and cost frozen at the time they are assigned to the package
Trade code and classification — for organizing packages
Status — Draft → Issued → BidsReceived → Leveling → Recommended → SupplierAwarded (plus Cancelled). Recommended records a reversible recommendation. Reopening a supplier award requires cancelling its live commitments and recording a reason.
Due date — bid deadline
Proposals — received bid proposals from contractors

Module quantity and cost are recorded when the module is assigned to the package. Inspect that basis before comparing it with a later estimate.

Bid Proposals

A Bid Proposal is a contractor’s or supplier’s priced response to a Bid Package. Each proposal records:

Base bid amount — the contractor’s total price for the package scope
Tax basis — includes or excludes tax, with the quoted rate. Declare it before financial comparison or supplier award; an unknown basis blocks those actions. The comparison uses the package’s declared basis while preserving the raw quote.
Alternates — optional pricing for alternative approaches or materials
Scope inclusions and exclusions — what the bid does and does not cover
Adjustments — leveling adjustments applied during bid evaluation

Bid Leveling Matrix

Bid Leveling is the process of comparing multiple proposals on a consistent basis so the client can select the best value, not just the lowest base price. Leveling accounts for:

Adjustment	Description	Impact
Add	Scope items the base bid excludes but the project requires	Increases effective bid
Deduct	Scope items included in the base bid but not needed	Decreases effective bid
Risk Allowance	Contingency for identified risks	Increases effective bid
Alternate Accepted	Pricing for accepted alternatives	Adjusts effective bid

Leveling produces an adjusted bid total for each proposal, enabling fair comparison.

In the full matrix, suppliers appear in columns and scope items appear in rows. Each cell shows the proposal’s coverage status, amount, and any supporting note or reference. Review whether the item is covered, excluded, or unclear before relying on its price.

Raise Clarifications From the Matrix

Raise a clarification directly from the supplier and scope-item cell that needs explanation. Darwin pre-fills the request with that supplier, scope item, coverage status, and amount so the question retains its context.

Clarifications created from an Excluded or Unclear cell are marked high priority. Follow them from the matrix’s Clarifications panel or the Work Requests hub.

A clarification is a Work Request composed from the cell you raised it on. It is not a separate bid object: the panel filters Work Requests raised from leveling.

Leveling Decisions and Award

A Leveling Decision records which proposal was selected, the rationale, and pass-over notes for each competing proposal. The decision records both the base bid and the leveled bid as they stood at decision time.

Move the package to Recommended first — that is the soft award, and it is reversible: if a bid revision lands or the estimate moves, send it back to Leveling and re-decide. The recommendation is a proposal, not a commitment.

Bring Bids In From a Spreadsheet

Most bids arrive by email and messaging as a filled sheet, so that is the intake path rather than a convenience.

Use Export scope sheet in the Bidders step to get the package’s scope as a spreadsheet, with one row per scope item and a fingerprint beside each one. Send it to whoever is pricing the work. When it comes back, choose the supplier and use Import filled sheet.

The import is deliberate about what it will and will not accept:

rows whose scope item has not changed are imported;
a row whose item was changed or deleted since the export is refused and named — an amount typed against a re-scoped line would otherwise become a commitment against work that no longer looks the same;
items added after the export come back as “not quoted”, so a gap is visible rather than silent;
coverage is read leniently, because “Excluido” and “Excluded” are the same answer.

Re-importing after adding one optional item does not invalidate anyone’s response. That is the point of fingerprinting per item instead of per package.

If catalog-unit normalization changed an expected unit, re-export older sheets before importing them. See Units of Measure.

Revisions

When a supplier sends a corrected quote, use New revision rather than editing. The old quote stays as the record of what they first said, the priced lines carry over, and the revision is numbered in the chain — so a decision always points at the exact revision it evaluated. History shows the chain.

The previous revision’s leveling adjustments are copied across too, but they do not count until someone confirms them. A revision very often exists precisely because the supplier fixed the gap one of those plugs covered, so carrying one silently into the new total would let a stale number decide the award. Each inherited plug is labelled with where it came from; confirm the ones that still apply and delete the rest.

What Leveling Teaches You

Recording a decision also captures market evidence: what each fully covered bid priced each scope line at, with the supplier, the proposal revision, the currency and the date.

Open a module’s Learning tab to see it. You get the sample count, the date range, and either a median comparison against what the module costs internally — or the reason no comparison is given:

fewer than three comparable bids, because a percentage off one bid is an anecdote wearing a decimal point;
no internal estimate to compare against yet;
the difference is inside the normal range.

The same signal appears in Material Intelligence as Bid Rate Divergence. Navigation from its table has a current limitation; open the module from the catalog and inspect Learning.

Two things this surface will not do, on purpose:

It will not change a price. A subcontractor’s rate bundles materials, labour, equipment, their overhead and their margin — it is not a price list line, and it is never written as one. If the evidence says your module is drifting from the market, the next step is a new price list version, authored by a person.
It will not invent a unit rate. A lump sum, or a supplier who quoted a different quantity than your estimate carries, shows no rate at all. A quantity difference is a scope signal in its own right, and dividing through it would describe nothing.

Bids that skip any Required scope item are not counted as evidence at all: a lower price for less work is not a market rate.

The estimate basis recorded for that proposal must also have been reviewed before its evidence is eligible. A comparison without a verified basis is identified as unavailable; do not interpret that as no difference.

From Recommended, award the package to the supplier you selected. Darwin then:

creates a commitment on the project’s active baseline, for the contracted value: the base bid plus the alternates you accepted — not the leveled total. Leveling adjustments are internal normalization, and a plug covering excluded scope is work you still owe;
writes one commitment line per scope item, mapped to the cost group that holds the work, so variance can be attributed per module rather than as one lump;
splits the value into subtotal and tax using the tax basis the supplier quoted. Declare the basis on every quote: prices arrive both with and without IVA, and comparing them raw makes a supplier look about 13% cheaper than they are;
reports any scope the award did not commit to as uncommitted exposure, next to the buyout. A supplier who left 10% of the scope out is not 10% under budget — they are 10% short.

If the package was priced against an older estimate revision, Darwin re-maps its scope onto the active baseline by module. Anything that cannot be matched stops the award and asks you to map it to a cost group or mark it excluded — Darwin will not guess where the money goes.

Continue in Cost Control to see the commitment alongside the project’s other tracked costs, with the buyout and the exposure shown as two separate things.

Award creates the commitment in Draft. Review and issue it through its lifecycle; a draft does not yet count in committed exposure.

Once a package is awarded, treat the matrix as the decision record rather than restarting the same award. A supplier who withdraws afterwards is a new decision cycle and a commitment revision, not a deletion.

To reopen awarded work, cancel its live commitments through their lifecycle and provide a reason. The next decision preserves the previous round’s recorded commercial terms and baseline mapping; it does not overwrite them. Live commitments also block package cancellation.

Workflow Role

An estimate is structured into bid packages during or after estimation — from the project’s Bidding tab, or from the estimation workspace while you are still estimating
Packages are issued to contractors for pricing
Proposals are received — typed in, or imported from a filled scope sheet — and leveled against the estimate scope, on one declared tax basis
- a corrected quote is a revision, not an edit; inherited leveling adjustments must be confirmed before they count
The package is soft-awarded (Recommended), then awarded to a supplier
The award creates a commitment with the contracted value, tax split, and module-level lines
Variance tracking traces procurement variance back to the bid event — and shows excluded scope as exposure, not as a saving
The same bids feed back as market evidence on the module, where it can inform the next estimate — but never as a price

Next Steps

➡️ Estimation Workspace
➡️ Use Cost Control