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Bid Express® Knowledge Center

Conduct a bid opening

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When the deadline has passed for your solicitation or RFP, you're ready to conduct a bid opening.  

Open bids

Once the bid deadline has passed and the submitted bids/responses have been opened, the owner-agency can download the submissions. All submitted bids/responses, no matter their status, are displayed.

To open your bids or responses:

  1. Navigate to the closed solicitation. Click View Bids or View Responses.
  2. From the Bids or Responses table you will see all submissions displayed.
  3. Click Open Bid or Open Response to open an individual submission, or click Open All to open all submissions at once.

  4. To view more details of an opened submission, click on the submission's business name hyperlink.

     

Navigate the Bids/Responses panel

In the Bids or Responses table, you can view, open, decrypt, and manage your solicitation’s submissions. Learn more about what you can see and do from this panel.

Columns

Click on a column heading to sort submissions by that column. The Bids or Responses table contains the following columns:

  • Business | Displays each participating vendor’s business name. By clicking the business name URL, you can do the following:
    • Review a vendor's complete submission.
    • Download the full bid packet as a custom PDF. You’ll have the option to include or exclude attachments and choose between printer-friendly (continuous) or pdf reader-friendly (component break) formats.
    • See the Submitted date and time, the agency user that Opened the bid, and who the bid was Signed by. This information appears under General Info. When printed, this will serve as the cover page of the PDF packet.
  • Status | Submissions may appear in your Bids/Responses table as responsive and complete (green) or non-responsive and incomplete or out-of-date(red). To confirm the status of each submission, hover over the red or green status flag. Once decrypted, all bids will appear with the date and time in which they were successfully opened from the Bid Express servers.
    • Incomplete: Incomplete indicates that the vendor submitted their bid without completing all the bid form fields marked required for your solicitation.
      • Note: While vendors can use a Check Bid tool at any time while drafting their bid or response, the system performs an automatic final check upon submission. If any required fields are missing, a browser warning will appear. The vendor can then click OK to submit as-is, or Cancel to be taken directly to the incomplete fields, which will be highlighted in red.
    • Responsive: A green status flag will always indicate “Responsive and Complete.” This means the vendor completed all required fields.
  • Bid/Response totals | If your solicitation gathers currency in the site’s Currency Input or Item List Components, the solicitation displays the total dollar amount ($) of any alternates (when applicable) and the official Bid Total.
    • Note: The bid total is calculated based on how each component was configured to calculate into the bid total. 
      • Example: The bid total only includes the item list groups specifically set to 'calculate.' For example, if you have three groups but only two are set to calculate, the third group's values were not added to the final bid total.

Actions

The table also includes the following actions buttons:

  • Add Manual Bid | For a complete post-bid analysis, enter any paper submissions or your Engineer’s Estimate into the platform. This lets the system include them in the final comparison reports.
  • More 
    • Export to Excel: Download a .xlsx file copy of the bids/responses table.
      • Note: This export only shows the columns of information as shown in the table.
    • Export to Appia: An export option that automates sending the bid data to Appia for bid tab analysis purposes and award purposes.
      • See here for more information about the Bid Express <> Appia integration.

If your team uses the service's multi-bidding functionality and has opted to use either of the two Envelope component options (bid form or required document list), you may also see:

  • Envelope | A hyperlink is available to preview the data entered in the first field of the envelope. Clicking this link opens a window displaying any additional information the vendor was required to provide.
  • Document | This link allows you to download individual attachments locally for a quick preview before you commit to decrypting the entire bid.Example: Some agencies verify proof of a valid bid bond as a prerequisite to opening a bid submission.

 

You can also take actions on single bids. On each bid's row, click the More menu to select from these options:

  • View bid/View response | An alternative to clicking the vendor’s business name.
  • Edit Score | If RFP functionality was enabled, once all evaluations are complete (outside of the service or via the service’s Evaluation functionality), click here to enter the final score for the vendor. 
  • Edit manual bid/Edit manual response | To edit any manual bids or engineer’s estimates you added to the table.

  • Remove manual bid/Remove manual response | Click this option to delete any manual bids or estimates you entered into the table and no longer need.