Construction

Bidding is expensive, and nobody measures it

A tender takes days of estimating time and sometimes weeks. A contractor might submit forty in a year and win eight. That is an enormous amount of unpaid work, and it is the single largest controllable cost in most contracting businesses.

Almost no one measures it properly. Ask a contractor their hit rate and you will usually get a number that is a feeling. Ask it by client, by sector, by value band or by the architect who invited them, and there is no answer at all, because the information required to produce one was never recorded in one place.

A tender is an opportunity with a value, a probability and stages. Recorded that way, with the stage history kept, the questions become arithmetic. Which clients invite us and never award. Which value band we actually win in. Whether the jobs we win are the ones we priced carefully or the ones we priced quickly. Every one of those changes what you bid for next quarter.

The people who choose you are not the people paying you

An architect specifies. A quantity surveyor shortlists. A main contractor invites. A client signs. In a great deal of construction work the relationship that produced the job is with somebody who never appears on the invoice.

Systems built around customers cannot express that, so the professional team ends up in someone's telephone. When that person leaves, the relationships leave with them, and the business discovers a year later that the enquiries have quietly stopped.

Holding people and organisations as one family, connected with roles and periods, is what fixes it. The architect is a person. Their practice is an organisation. The connection between them has dates, so when they move the relationship follows the person rather than dying with the firm, and the projects they specified you on remain connected to both.

The job ends and the liability does not

A defect appears eighteen months after practical completion. A dispute arises over something agreed on site. An adjudication asks what was said and when. In every one of those, the value of your records is the history of a project that finished, and in most contractors that history is an email folder.

A site or project as a record with its own timeline, connected to the client, the professional team and every subcontractor who worked on it, is what makes that answerable. It survives the job ending, it survives the estimator leaving, and it gives one place to look rather than three people to ask.

Not construction project management

No programme. No drawings. No request for information workflow. No valuations or applications for payment. No site diaries, no common data environment, no model federation, and no integration with any of the systems that do those things today.

Those are genuinely difficult products and this is not one of them. A contractor who needs them needs them, and we would rather lose the enquiry on this page than at the end of a trial.

Not a health and safety system

It tracks documents and dates. It does not do risk assessments, method statements, inductions, toolbox talks or accident reporting, and none of the duties described by the Health and Safety Executive are discharged by a date in a database. Treating a document tracker as a safety system would be a serious mistake and it is not one we want anyone making on our account.

What contractors use it for alongside those

The commercial side. Who invites us, who awards, what we bid and what it cost us to bid. Which specifiers are worth the relationship. Which subcontractors we actually use and whether their paperwork is current. What happened on a job in 2024 when someone rings about it in 2026.

None of that is what project management software is for, and all of it is currently in an inbox.

Make the project the record and connect the professional team to it

The durable thing is a scheme, and the people around it are a team that changes: the architect, the quantity surveyor, the main contractor, the client, the subcontractors. Connections carry roles and periods, which is what lets you answer who was the QS on that job in 2023.

Model the tender pipeline separately from anything else

Invited, priced, submitted, shortlisted, awarded. It has a different shape and different probabilities from any other work you do, and forcing it through one set of stages produces a forecast that is wrong in two directions.

Record the professional contacts as relationships, not as fields

The architect who put you on the list is the single most valuable relationship in this trade and is usually recorded as a name in a tender document. Made into a relationship with the projects connected to it, it becomes answerable: who has put us on a list, how often, and what did we win.

Put every document expiry in as a dated task

Insurance, accreditations, certifications, the prequalification renewal. Missing one of these removes you from a tender list, and it happens to someone every year for entirely administrative reasons.

Then leave the reporting alone until you have a full tender cycle

A cycle in this trade is long. Any conclusion drawn from six weeks of data is a conclusion about your import.

January: the invitation arrives in a shared inbox

A main contractor's buyer emails four specialists asking whether they want to price the mechanical package on a two storey extension to a primary school. Nothing about that email announces itself as worth recording. It is a question, and the answer is yes or no rather than a job.

Recorded properly it is four things at once. An opportunity sitting at the stage you call invited, with a value that is a guess and a probability that is not. The main contractor as an organisation. The buyer as a person, connected to that organisation with a role and a start date. And the school as the site, which is the record that will still matter when everything else in this story has finished.

Left alone, the email sits in a shared inbox and the only evidence it ever existed is that someone remembers being asked. Twelve months from now that is the difference between knowing this contractor invites you every spring and thinking they might.

February: the take off, and the enquiries you send out yourself

The estimator spends the best part of a week on the take off. Enquiries go out to three suppliers for the plant. Two come back with prices. One never replies, and the figure that goes into the tender is carried forward from a job last year with a margin added for nerves.

Two things here are worth recording and are almost never recorded. The first is what pricing this cost you, in days, because that is the only route by which a hit rate stops being a percentage and becomes money. The second is the supplier who did not reply, since a supplier who goes quiet while you are tendering does not become more responsive once you have a contract depending on them.

Both belong on records that already exist: the days against the opportunity, the silence against the supplier. Neither needs a new field and neither survives in an inbox.

March to May: submitted, and then nothing at all

The tender goes in on a Friday. Then silence, which in this trade is entirely normal and is indistinguishable from a decision that went the other way weeks ago. The estimator moves on to the next one, because there are always three next ones.

A stage with a date on it is what turns that silence into information. It shows the tender has now sat at submitted for twice as long as the last three from this same contractor, which is either a delayed scheme or a decision nobody has told you about, and a telephone call settles which. Nobody makes that call from memory, because memory does not hold the comparison.

Late May: the award goes elsewhere

An email arrives saying unsuccessful on price. In most businesses the row is deleted, or coloured red and never opened again. What disappears with it is the price you submitted, the reason, and the name of whoever won.

Recorded, the opportunity closes at lost with all three on it, and the winner is usually obtainable simply by asking in the reply to that email rather than a fortnight later when it has become an awkward question. Do that consistently for a year and you can answer whether you lose to the same two competitors on this kind of work, which is a different business decision from believing you are generally a bit expensive.

Eighteen months later, the same buyer at a different contractor

The buyer moves to a larger contractor and an invitation arrives from an organisation you have never worked with. In most contracting businesses this reads as a new enquiry from a stranger.

With periods on the connection, the previous employment closes, the new one opens, and the old contractor keeps an honest record of who was there in which years. The person you are being invited by is the same person you priced for before. You know what you quoted, that you lost it on price, and by roughly how much if he told you. That is the whole of the advantage, and it costs one field.

Two years after that, the school rings about phase two

The school's business manager rings about a second phase. You did not win the first one, so there is no job to look up and nothing in the accounts package, because the accounts package only knows people who paid you.

The site record knows. It carries the first tender, the architect who wrote the specification, the contractor who did win, and the fact that you were within touching distance. The estimator prices phase two knowing all of it. And had you won phase one, the same record is the thing a defect call in year two lands against, along with the subcontractors connected to it and the correspondence attached to the scheme rather than filed under whoever happened to send it.

Client, employer and customer

In a building contract the employer is the party commissioning the work, which is confusing in a system that also has employees. In practice the trade says client for the same party and reserves customer for retail. If you are a subcontractor, your client is the main contractor and the employer is somebody you may never meet, and the two are different relationships with different money attached.

The product has no opinion about which word you use. What matters is that both parties exist as records and that the connection between them says which is which, because the person who chases you for a price and the party whose budget it is are frequently not the same organisation.

Job, scheme, project and contract

A job on a maintenance page is a visit. Here it is the whole of a build, and the same thing gets called a scheme by the estimator, a project by the client and a contract by the person who has actually read it. All four words point at the durable record.

The distinction worth keeping is between the site and the contract. A school is a site that is still there in ten years. A contract on it ends. Model the site as the thing that lasts and hang each contract off it, and phase two arrives connected to phase one rather than as an unrelated enquiry.

Enquiry, invitation and tender

Elsewhere an enquiry is anyone asking about anything. In contracting an enquiry is usually a specific document you send to a supplier, an invitation is what you receive from a contractor, and a tender is what you send back. Three words, three directions of travel.

The one that gets lost is the enquiry that never became an invitation: someone rang, asked whether you do this kind of work, and never sent anything. Those are not tenders and do not belong in the tender pipeline, and if they go in there the hit rate stops meaning anything. They are a relationship with a note on it.

Prequalification, approved list and framework

Prequalification is the process of proving you are allowed to be asked. An approved list is the result of it at one client. A framework is a formal arrangement with a term, under which work is called off without a full tender each time.

They behave differently and the difference is a date. Prequalification lapses and must be renewed. An approved list quietly stops inviting you and nobody writes to tell you. A framework has an end date years away that then arrives suddenly. All three are worth being records with dates instead of a shared understanding.

Subcontractor is a role, not a kind of company

The same firm can be your subcontractor on one scheme, your client on the next and your competitor in the tender after that. Businesses that model this as a type on the company record end up with a company filed wrongly two thirds of the time.

It belongs on the connection between them and the scheme, with a period. Then the question of who they were to you is answered per job, which is the only level at which it has an answer.

Retention is not a payment term

Payment terms describe when an invoice falls due. Retention is a proportion of money held back until the work is accepted as complete and released later still, and it is a separate fact with its own date that arrives long after everybody has stopped thinking about the job.

The payment and adjudication rules it sits inside are in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, and Consonas does not calculate retention, hold valuations or produce applications for payment. What it can carry is the date the release is due as a field with a task before it, so the money is chased by someone rather than remembered by no one. Money left with a contractor who has gone quiet is the commonest thing in this trade that is simply never collected.

The buyer invites you and the quantity surveyor decides what you get paid

Inside one main contractor these are two people with opposing interests in you. The buyer wants a competitive price and a subcontractor who turns up. The quantity surveyor assesses what you have done and what will be certified, and is measured on the commercial outcome of the job.

Businesses that record one contact per contractor almost always record the buyer, because the buyer is who they meet first. Then a valuation is disputed and no one in the office knows the name of the person disputing it. Both belong on the record, connected to the same organisation with different roles, and on larger contractors both are connected to the particular scheme as well, because the surveyor changes between jobs and the buyer usually does not.

The employer's agent, the contract administrator and the clerk of works

On the client's side there is frequently someone whose job is to represent the client against you. The title depends on the form of contract. What they share is authority over whether your work is accepted, and no authority at all over whether you are invited back.

The clerk of works is the one worth naming here. No budget, no signature on your contract, on site every week, and an opinion of your work that reaches the client without passing through anyone who is negotiating with you. Most experienced contractors can name one who cost them a repeat scheme. They belong in the record with a role and a note, and they are almost never in anybody's system.

The principal designer, and the paperwork that arrives with them

There is a duty holder for design coordination and safety information on most schemes of any size, and they generate requests for documents from you at predictable points: appointment, before work starts, and at handover.

Consonas holds documents and dates. It does not produce them, does not run the process and is not a health and safety system, which this page says plainly further up and is worth repeating in the paragraph where someone might hope otherwise. What it is useful for is knowing which of your own supply chain has current paperwork before someone asks for it rather than after.

The framework manager and the approved installer list

Two relationships that produce work without ever being a client. A framework manager administers the arrangement and often decides who is invited to a call off. A manufacturer whose approved installer list you sit on sends enquiries to the installers nearest the enquiry.

Neither pays you and both control your workload. Connect the opportunities that came through each of them and the value of the relationship becomes a figure rather than an assumption, which is what you want when the manufacturer next asks you to send two people on a training course.

Which of them is worth a record, and which is not

The temptation with a list like this is to create a relationship type for every party and a record for every name on every document. That produces an address book which is mostly noise inside a year, and noise is what makes people stop trusting a system.

The test is whether you expect to meet them again. An architect, a quantity surveyor, a buyer, a framework manager and a clerk of works at a client with an estate all pass it. A building control officer on one scheme usually does not, and belongs as a note on the scheme rather than as a person with a record. Roles on connections carry all of this without new record types, which is why the number of relationship types worth creating in this trade stays small even though the number of parties never does.

Where the tender modelling is described in full

The stages and the weighted forecast are on sales pipelines and forecasting, the expiry dates and the task raised before them on tasks, appointments and the calendar, and bringing the tender register in on import, export and search. Contractors who also hold planned maintenance contracts should read maintenance and facilities, where the site instead of the tender is the record everything hangs off, and anybody building for landlords and developers will recognise the client on letting and estate agency.