What you can export
Exports sit on the Guard & export step of the bid wizard and on the Exports tab of every bid's workspace. Where the tender issued its own BOQ workbook or bidding forms in a format Bidligence can complete, they come first, in a box headed "In the tender's own format — submit these". Each file below is built from the bid as it stands when you click it:
| Export | Format | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Priced BOQ, in the tender's own workbook | XLSX | The employer's .xlsx or .xlsm with your rates in its Rate cells, its Amount and subtotal cells as formulas, and its wording, layout and own figures as issued |
| Bidding Forms & Technical Proposal, in the tender's own document | DOCX | The tender's Word forms with their blanks completed and the employer's wording and styles kept |
| Bill of Quantities | XLSX | A cover sheet and the priced bill in your company's colours |
| Technical Proposal | DOCX | The generated proposal sections in one document, closing with a declaration for signature |
| Cover Letter | DOCX | Your letter to the procuring entity, with the bid price, validity, declarations and enclosures |
| Key Personnel CVs | DOCX | Each CV on a new page, with qualifications, certifications and key projects |
| Programme of Works | DOCX | Every task with its phase, start day, duration and dependencies; milestones marked ◆ |
| Compliance Matrix | DOCX | Each requirement with its status, evidence and action required |
| Risk Register | DOCX | Each risk with likelihood, impact, severity, mitigation, owner and residual risk |
| Forms & Declarations | DOCX | Each form on a new page, ready to print, sign and stamp |
| Submission Checklist | DOCX | The Submission Guard rows with their status, evidence and notes |
| Complete Bid Package | ZIP | Every submission file above, the original tender documents, your linked vault files, any design drawings and a README |
| Rate Review — Basis of Rates | XLSX | Internal: where every BOQ rate came from. Not in the ZIP |
| Bid Preparation Report | DOCX | Internal: what was generated, on what basis, and what is still outstanding. Not in the ZIP |
How it works
From a blank workspace to a downloaded package, in order:
- 1Set your branding once. Under Settings, Branding & Super Intelligence, pick one of four colour presets or set your own primary and accent colours. In the Company Vault, upload your letterhead as a PNG image or a JPEG of up to 2 MB.
- 2Analyse and price the tender. Nothing exports before the tender analysis has run, and the tender's own workbook and the Rate Review need a priced BOQ.
- 3Generate the documents. Each Word export built from a generated document unlocks once that document has been generated, and the Technical Proposal once at least one of its sections has; the Submission Checklist exports at any time. A greyed-out button names what it is waiting for.
- 4Click the file you want. It is built from the bid as it stands, downloaded and stored with the bid. Export history lists your recent exports with their size and age, and Open downloads one again.
- 5Check, sign and submit. Edit in Word or Excel, sign, stamp and deliver. Then press Mark as submitted to move the bid along the pipeline and stop its deadline reminders.
The tender's own BOQ and forms, completed in place
The bill. When the tender pack includes its bill of quantities as an .xlsx or .xlsm workbook, the priced copy is the employer's own file. Bidligence writes your rates into its Rate cells and turns each Amount cell into a formula, quantity times rate, so the evaluator can audit it. Each subtotal sums its own section, the employer's own contingency and total formulas stand as issued, provisional sums keep the employer's figure, and the workbook recalculates when it is opened. It is not exported while any line lacks a rate or the bid's BOQ does not match the tender's lines; you are asked to regenerate the BOQ instead. An old .xls or a CSV cannot be priced in place: save it as .xlsx and upload it again.
The forms. When the tender issues its bidding forms as a Word (.docx) document, Bidligence opens that file and writes only into its blanks: "[insert …]" instructions, "____" lines, field labels and empty table cells. A form the tender says to complete once per person or item of equipment is repeated for each, and where a form asks you to describe something, such as a method statement, the bid's own content goes beneath the instruction. Fonts, numbering, table styles and page settings stay as the employer issued them.
Signature, seal and witness lines are left for signing by hand. A fact Bidligence cannot ground in your evidence is written as "[CONFIRM: …]", and the export button tells you how many entries it completed and how many are marked to confirm. The first completion takes a few minutes and draws on the workspace's credits. After that the completed file is reused until the bid, your vault, your company profile or your rate library changes, and Complete them again now forces a fresh build.
What every exported document carries
The documents Bidligence builds itself share one house style, set by your branding and, where it says so, by the tender:
- Your letterhead on every page of every Word document Bidligence builds, scaled into a banner without stretching or enlarging it. Without one, the header carries your company name and the tender reference, or the project name when there is no reference.
- Your colours on the cover page, headings and table headers of the Word documents, and on the cover sheet and header row of the workbooks.
- A cover page on every Word document except the cover letter, with your company name, the document title, the project, the client and tender reference, your address and the date.
- The tender's prescribed font. When the tender's format instructions name a common font such as Arial or Times New Roman, or a size from 8 to 14 pt, the body text and tables of the Word documents follow it. Otherwise they are set in Calibri 11 pt.
- The workbook's total as the bid price. The Technical Proposal states, and the tender's forms are completed from, the grand total the Bill of Quantities workbook adds up to, including any contingency the tender's own bill adds below its subtotal.
- A Bill of Quantities workbook a quantity surveyor can read. A cover sheet with the project, client, tender reference, location, closing date in the tender's time zone, currency and your contact details; then reference, description, unit, quantity, rate, amount and notes for every line, a subtotal per bill, any contingency the tender's own bill adds, and the grand total, with the equivalent in your home currency when you bid in another. Your cost before margin and the margin itself never appear on it: they stay in the internal Rate Review.
- A Technical Proposal in this order: project summary with the bid price and validity, understanding of scope, the evaluation criteria and their weights where the tender gives them, company profile, then the work plan, method statement, programme, key personnel, health and safety, quality, risk, sustainability, answers to tender questions and a compliance statement for each one generated, closing with a declaration and signature block.
The complete package as one ZIP
One click on Complete Bid Package builds a single archive, named after the tender reference and project, for the person who assembles the submission:
- the tender's own completed BOQ workbook and forms first, when the tender issued them in a format Bidligence can complete;
- the Bill of Quantities workbook and each Word deliverable that has been generated: Technical Proposal, cover letter, CVs, programme, compliance matrix, risk register, forms and declarations, and the Submission Checklist;
- a tender-documents folder with the original tender files, for the record;
- a company-documents folder with the Company Vault files you flagged to travel with every bid and those the Submission Guard linked as evidence;
- a drawings folder with the files of the bid's latest design run, when it has one, with a notice in the README saying whether an engineer's sign-off is recorded against the set or every sheet is marked NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION;
- a README.txt listing the bid documents, company documents and drawings in the archive and naming any it skipped, with the reason. Two files with the same name in a folder are numbered rather than overwritten.
Left out by design: the Rate Review and the Bid Preparation Report are internal working papers, and the README says so. Export them one by one from the same page.
What stays with your team
The BOQ lines the employer receives never carry your pricing provenance. Every BOQ line in a client-bound export passes through one narrow boundary that keeps only its reference, description, unit, quantity, rate, amount and notes, and strips internal remarks from the notes. Which won contract, library estimate or supplier quote set a rate stays out of the client's files; it is in the Rate Review, for your team. Forms & Declarations carries no appendix of review notes, and the tender's own forms are never written from the Mock Evaluator's findings or the Bid Preparation Report.
Two exports exist for your team alone:
- Rate Review — Basis of Rates (XLSX). Bannered as an internal working paper, it lists every line's base rate, any market reference, final rate and where the rate came from. For each line with a build-up, a Rate Build-ups sheet sets out its resources with quantity per unit and unit cost, each amount and the net rate as live formulas, its productivity and justification, and its price sources as clickable links.
- Bid Preparation Report (DOCX). Marked internal, it explains what Bidligence generated and why, the pricing approach, the bid's competitiveness, the outstanding actions before submission and what the package was built from.
How it connects to the rest of the bid desk
Exports are where the rest of the bid desk ends up:
- BOQ pricing sets the rates the workbooks carry, and the margin you choose there is in every rate the employer sees, except the employer's own provisional sums, which keep their printed figure.
- The Submission Guard exports as the Submission Checklist, and the vault files it links travel in the ZIP.
- The Company Vault holds your letterhead, your company profile and the standing attachments the ZIP copies into every package.
- Evidence-locked AI marks what it could not ground in your evidence; those "[CONFIRM: …]" placeholders export as written, so you find them before the evaluator does.
- Hunter, the bid agent, lists which deliverables are ready and builds any Bidligence deliverable, or the complete ZIP, from a chat.
- Design drawings from the bid's latest design run go into the ZIP's drawings folder.
Its limits, and your control
An export is a set of drafts in the formats you need, not a finished submission. Know where it stops:
- Read before you send. The documents are drafted by Super Intelligence from your evidence. Placeholders are not stripped: a "[CONFIRM: …]" left in the text goes out as written, so search for square brackets.
- Signing and delivery stay with you. Signature, stamp and witness lines are left blank, and uploading to the portal or delivering by hand is your team's job.
- Editable formats only. The bid documents export as DOCX and XLSX, or one ZIP of them. If the tender wants a fixed-layout copy, save it from Word or Excel after your final edits.
- The tender's own files have conditions. Its bill is priced in place only from an .xlsx or .xlsm workbook whose lines match the bid's BOQ, and its forms are completed in place only when issued as a Word (.docx) document.
- Exports need the Reviewer role or higher. Viewers cannot export, and uploading or removing the letterhead needs the Finance role or higher.
- Exports are stored. The latest export of each kind stays with the bid for downloading again, older copies of the same export are cleared after a few months, and stored exports count towards the workspace's storage allowance.
Which plans include it
Branded, editable DOCX and XLSX exports are part of Starter (US$399 a month) and Pro (US$799 a month), each starting with a 3-day free trial. Generating the documents behind the Word exports, from the 12 document generators, needs one of those plans.
A free workspace gets 500 welcome credits once its e-mail is confirmed: enough to analyse a tender, get its Bid Score and see its BOQ priced. The Free plan includes manual BOQ editing and exports, so that priced bill can leave as a workbook. See pricing.
Questions
- Can I edit the documents after I export them?
- Yes. Every written deliverable is a Word (DOCX) file and the bills are Excel (XLSX) workbooks, so you can change wording, add signatures and stamps, and make final edits in the programs you already use.
- Do you export the bid documents as PDF?
- No. The export page and Hunter offer the bid documents as editable DOCX and XLSX, or as one ZIP of them, so the last edits stay yours. If a tender asks for a fixed-layout copy, save it from Word or Excel once you have finished.
- Will the employer see where my rates came from?
- No. Client-bound BOQ exports carry only each line's reference, description, unit, quantity, rate, amount and notes, with internal remarks stripped. The basis of every rate is in the Rate Review, an internal workbook that is left out of the submission ZIP.
- Does Bidligence fill in the tender's own BOQ and bidding forms?
- Yes, when the tender issues its bill as an .xlsx or .xlsm workbook and its forms as a Word (.docx) document. An .xlsx or .xlsm bill is priced in its own Rate cells, with Amount cells as formulas; Word bidding forms are completed in their own blanks, with the employer's wording and layout kept and signature lines left for you.
- What is in the complete package ZIP?
- The tender's own completed files where it issued them, the Bill of Quantities workbook, each generated Word deliverable, the original tender documents, the Company Vault files flagged for every bid or linked on the Submission Checklist, the latest design drawings if any, and a README listing the documents, vault files and drawings it holds and anything skipped.
- Can I put my own letterhead on the documents?
- Yes. Upload a PNG image or a JPEG of up to 2 MB in the Company Vault and it heads every page of every Word document Bidligence builds. Without one, the header carries your company name in your primary colour beside the tender reference.