Bid / no-bid checklist

The checklist covers the four things that most often sink a public bid: eligibility, fit to the marking scheme, capacity and commercial sense. Here is each question and why it earns its place.

1. 1. Do we meet every mandatory / pass-fail requirement? Turnover thresholds, insurance levels, certifications, tax clearance. These aren’t scored — they’re gates. One miss usually means automatic exclusion, however good the rest of your bid.
2. 2. Can we complete the ESPD honestly, with no exclusion grounds? The ESPD is a self-declaration of eligibility; the winner proves it later. If you’d have to declare an exclusion ground, or fudge an answer, stop here.
3. 3. Is the scope a genuine fit for what we actually deliver? Evaluators score against specialists. Bidding outside your core work rarely scores well, and it shows in the evidence — or the lack of it.
4. 4. Do we have real, relevant evidence? Case studies, references, named people with the right experience. Every scored answer needs proof behind it; a section you’d have to pad with generalities is a section you’ll lose marks on.
5. 5. Do we understand the award criteria and weightings? Irish public tenders are scored on MEAT criteria — quality, methodology, team, price, each with a weighting. You bid to the marks. If the scheme is unclear, ask a clarification before the deadline for questions closes.
6. 6. Do we have the capacity and time to write a strong response? A rushed submission on a tight deadline usually underscores. Count the real days available, minus the day job.
7. 7. Is this genuinely winnable? Some tenders are shaped around an incumbent or a known competitor. You can’t always tell, but an honest read of the spec — oddly specific requirements, an incumbent with years in place — is worth a hard look before you invest days.
8. 8. Does the value and margin justify the cost of bidding? Factor in the hours to bid and the hours to deliver, not just the headline contract value. A win that loses money is worse than a no-bid.

Most questions above are judgement calls that trade off against each other. These four are not — any one of them should end the discussion, whatever the rest of the checklist says:

• A mandatory requirement you can’t meet. Pass/fail means pass/fail. Buyers cannot waive it for you, and a bid that fails a gate is wasted effort — the evaluators may never read the rest.
• No tax clearance. Tax clearance is mandatory for Irish public contracts. If yours has lapsed, fix that with Revenue before you bid — not after you win.
• Evidence you’d have to invent. If you don’t have the case studies or references the scored criteria demand, you can’t make them up — and thin, general answers lose to competitors with proof.
• A deadline you can’t write well inside. If the honest answer is “we’d be submitting a rushed draft”, the time is better spent preparing for the next tender — which is where a good alert earns its keep.

The discipline pays because the pipeline is deep: roughly 6,850 tenders a year in Ireland across €22bn+ of public spending. Saying no to a bad fit costs you nothing — another tender is always coming. Watch the right CPV codes and the flow takes care of itself.

Once you decide to bid, the work is answering to the marking scheme with evidence. Build a requirements matrix from the pack — every question, every weighting, every mandatory — and draft to it. The tender & bid writing guide walks through the method by hand, the tender response template gives you the structure, and winning government contracts in Ireland covers the wider game.

Or let TenderBuilder do the structural drafting: upload the pack and it extracts the requirements, drafts to the marking scheme grounded in your own business facts, and runs a compliance check. In TenderBuilder, every tender opens with its own bid/no-bid brief, and a credit is only used when you decide to bid and draft. Decide no-bid and it costs you nothing.