A tender pack with forty sites
A housing association has put its grounds maintenance out to tender. The pack contains a specification, a schedule of forty estates with rough areas, a list of tasks with frequencies, and a pricing spreadsheet with hundreds of rows. The deadline is in three weeks and the crews are flat out.
The owner spends evenings on Google Maps measuring grass areas, counting shrub beds and guessing hedge lengths, then working out how many crew hours each site needs per year. The spreadsheet takes shape slowly. A mistake in a formula on row 312 goes unnoticed.
Why tenders swallow so much time
Tender pricing is repetitive work that relies on a few key numbers: how long your crews take to cut a hectare with a ride-on, how long a metre of hedge takes, and how far apart the sites are. Those numbers are rarely written down, so they are worked out again each time, and the buyer's spreadsheet is filled in by hand.
- Site areas in the pack are rough or missing and have to be measured.
- Your productivity rates for each task are not recorded anywhere.
- Frequencies vary by site and by season, so the annual quantity is calculated line by line.
- Travel between sites is guessed.
- The buyer's pricing schedule is filled in manually, with the risk of errors.
What slow tender pricing costs
Some tenders are not bid at all because nobody has the time. Those that are bid are priced in a rush, which risks winning a contract at a rate that loses money for three years, or losing a good one by pricing too high. The owner's time goes into arithmetic instead of site visits and the written quality answers that often decide the result.
The tender tool we build
- Your productivity rates are recorded once and kept up to date from real crew time: grass cutting by machine type, hedge cutting by height, bed maintenance, litter picking, leaf clearance.
- Site areas are measured by drawing on aerial mapping in the tool, with each area tagged by task, such as amenity grass, meadow, shrub bed or hedge.
- The tender specification is read and each site is given its task frequencies. Where the pack is unclear, the question is flagged for a clarification to the buyer.
- The tool calculates annual hours and material costs per site, adds travel based on site locations, and applies your overheads and margin.
- The result is written into the buyer's pricing schedule in the format they require, with a check that totals and formulas agree.
- After the award, winning rates and sites can seed the maintenance scheduler directly.
| Task | What the tool needs | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Amenity grass | Area and cuts per year | Mapped area, specification |
| Hedges | Length, height, cuts per year | Mapped length, specification |
| Shrub beds | Area, visits per year | Mapped area, specification |
| Leaf clearance | Area, visits in season | Specification |
| Travel | Site locations | Tender schedule addresses |
Your rates stay yours. The tool calculates from them and shows its working, and the owner checks the price before anything is submitted.
What bidding looks like afterwards
Measuring forty sites becomes an afternoon of drawing on maps rather than a week of evenings. The pricing is consistent because it uses the same rates every time. Errors in the buyer's spreadsheet are caught before submission. And the owner has time for the parts of the bid that need them, such as site visits and the method statement.
Is tendering stretching you thin?
- You have skipped tenders because there was no time to price them.
- Your productivity rates are in your head.
- Measuring sites is done by hand for every bid.
- You have won a contract and later found it priced too low.
- The buyer's pricing spreadsheet is filled in manually.