Suppliers quote what they imagine you meant
Give five suppliers a vague brief and you get five different projects priced. One assumes a simple version, one assumes an enterprise build, and you cannot compare any of them.
The brief's job is not to specify the solution. It is to remove enough ambiguity that everyone is pricing the same thing.
The eight sections
- The problem, in business terms. What happens today, what it costs, why now.
- Who uses it — roles, rough numbers, technical confidence, internal or external.
- The workflows, described as steps. This is the most important section and the one most often missing.
- Systems it must touch, named, with whether they have an API if you know.
- Constraints — deadlines, regulatory requirements, existing technology you must keep, data residency.
- Success criteria, measurable. “Order entry under two minutes” beats “more efficient”.
- Budget range. Yes, really. See below.
- What you are not asking for, which prevents helpful over-scoping.
Describe workflows as steps, not features
“A dashboard for managers” is a feature request and tells a supplier almost nothing. “A manager checks on Monday morning which jobs are behind schedule and reassigns them” describes a workflow, and any competent supplier can price that.
Write the three most common workflows as numbered steps, from the user's first action to the outcome. A brief containing three good workflow descriptions will get better quotes than one containing thirty bullet-pointed features.
Say your budget
The common fear is that stating a budget means paying all of it. In practice, withholding it produces proposals aimed at the wrong scale entirely and wastes everyone's time.
A range works well: “we expect this to be £20,000–£40,000 and we would like to understand what each end buys.” That gets you comparable proposals scoped to a scale you can actually approve.
Include the awkward details
- The legacy system nobody wants to touch but which must keep working
- The approval process, especially if a committee is involved
- The data that is in a poor state — suppliers will find out anyway
- The previous attempt that failed, and what happened
- The internal person whose support you will need and may not have
Disclosing these gets you a realistic price. Hiding them gets you an optimistic price followed by a change request, which is worse for both sides.
What to ask for in the response
Ask every supplier for the same structure: understanding of the problem, proposed approach, price broken into phases, timeline with milestones, assumptions, exclusions, and who will do the work.
The assumptions section is the most revealing part of any proposal. A supplier who lists ten specific assumptions has thought about your project; one with none has not read the brief carefully.