# How to bid on a public tender > What actually happens between finding a tender and submitting a bid: reading the documents, checking eligibility, arranging the bond, building the technical offer, pricing it and submitting before the clock. Source: https://trinta.ai/guides/how-to-bid-on-a-public-tender · Format: Markdown mirror of that page · Language: en This is the universal shape of a public bid. The specifics, what is mandatory, what is scored and how, always live in the documents of the individual procedure, and they govern. A serious first bid takes weeks rather than days, mostly because of paperwork that has to be requested from third parties. Plan backwards from the deadline, not forwards from today. ## The steps ### 1. Read the documents, not the notice The notice announces the procedure; the documents decide it. Download the full set, the specification, the administrative clauses, the bill of quantities and every annex, and read the eligibility and evaluation sections first. Most losing bids were losable at this stage, when a mandatory requirement the notice never mentioned was already visible in the tender documents. The vocabulary of these documents: https://trinta.ai/glossary ### 2. Check every mandatory requirement against your company Mandatory means eliminating: a classification you lack, a reference project you cannot show, a certification that expired, a registration you never completed. Go through them one by one and mark each yes or no honestly. If a no cannot become a yes before the deadline, the decision is already made, and finding that out on day one saves the weeks that would otherwise go into a bid that cannot be accepted. ### 3. Decide bid or no bid, deliberately Score the opportunity before you commit a team to it: fit with what you sell, ability to meet the requirements, time remaining, knowledge of the buyer, whether an incumbent holds every advantage, and whether the price can work at a margin you would sign. A structured decision beats enthusiasm, and a written no-bid reason is what turns a pipeline into a strategy. Score it in two minutes: https://trinta.ai/bid-no-bid ### 4. Calculate the real deadline Deadlines are stated with a date and an hour, and electronic platforms close automatically: a minute late is not submitted. Work out the working days you actually have, note whether the clock runs in calendar or working days, and put the mandatory intermediate dates in the calendar too, the site visit and the clarification window, because those close long before the submission date. Count working days and deadlines: https://trinta.ai/calculadora-prazos ### 5. Ask your questions inside the clarification window Every ambiguity you find is a question, and the window to ask is short and stated in the documents. Answers are normally circulated to all bidders, so reading everyone else's questions tells you what the competition is worried about and where the buyer's specification is soft. A supplier who submits on assumptions instead of asking is bidding on a different tender than the one being run. ### 6. Arrange the bid bond early Where a bid bond or guarantee is required, it comes from your bank, and banks take days, not hours. The amount, the format and the validity period are specified exactly, and a bond in the wrong form is treated as a missing bond. This single item eliminates more otherwise-competitive bids than any technical failure, purely because it was left until the final week. ### 7. Build the technical offer against the scoring grid Write to the criteria, in their order and with their weights in front of you. If methodology carries forty per cent, forty per cent of your effort belongs there. Answer what is asked rather than what you would prefer to say, name the specific products and capacities you are offering, and never recycle a memory from another tender: evaluators recognise a generic document instantly. ### 8. Price it against the real cost of delivering Price with the contract's obligations in front of you: delay penalties, the guarantee period, the performance bond that will tie up your bank facility for the contract's duration, and the validity period during which your prices stay fixed. In markets that decide on price alone, the discipline is knowing your floor. An abnormally low price also invites a formal justification request you must be able to answer. ### 9. Submit early, then verify Upload with hours to spare, not minutes: platforms are slowest exactly when everyone is submitting, and a failed upload at the deadline is a lost bid with no appeal. After submitting, confirm the platform's receipt and keep the evidence. Then record the outcome when it comes, won or lost, because the award notices and the prices in them are the material for the next bid. What awards reveal: https://trinta.ai/procurement-statistics ## Frequently asked questions **Can a foreign company bid on public tenders?** Often yes, and in the EU single market the principle is open access, but the answer for any given contract lives in that procedure's documents: registration, classification, local agent, language and sometimes local-content conditions vary by country and by contract. Read the eligibility section before investing in the bid, and treat general advice, including this page, as orientation rather than as the rule for your tender. **Why do most public bids fail?** Rarely on the quality of the offer. The common causes are earlier and more mundane: a mandatory document missing or in the wrong form, a bond arranged too late, an offer built on assumptions instead of clarifications, or a price set without reading the penalty and guarantee clauses. Reading the full document set on day one prevents most of them, which is why it is the first step here. No rule of law is asserted in this guide: procedures vary by country and by contract, and the documents of each procedure govern. --- Full site index for agents: https://trinta.ai/llms.txt · Whole site in one document: https://trinta.ai/llms-full.txt