Meet the deadline

The deadline is when your offer has to be in — not when you start working on it.

Submitted means submitted

While your offer is still a draft, you can work on it. Once you have sent it, it can no longer be edited.

What you can do instead is withdraw the offer and submit a new one. Together, that is the only route to a correction. But the two steps have different time windows, and that is easy to get wrong:

• Withdrawing is possible at any time. The software ties it to no deadline.
• Submitting again is only possible while the tender is still open. Once it has closed, you can still withdraw — but not replace.

A withdrawn offer is gone for good. It cannot be reopened, the new one is a separate offer, and the buying organisation sees both and is notified of the withdrawal.

What a withdrawal means for you is not for the software to decide — that is the buying organisation’s call and depends on the procurement rules that apply to them. Talk to them before withdrawing an offer that is already well into the procedure.

Plan around that: the last look at your offer belongs before you send it, not after.

Recommendation

Submit a day early anyway. Not because you could still touch it up afterwards — but because you then have a valid offer in the system, and enough time left to go the whole way round through withdrawing and resubmitting if something is wrong. A finished offer with a flaw beats a perfect one that was never sent.

What speaks against the last hour

Large files, slow connections, and a question nobody is left to answer. None of those help you once the deadline has passed.

Then there is the most mundane case of all: the person with the login is out of the office. That is exactly what the deputy in your company profile is for.

Check that it arrived

Do not rely on the feeling of having clicked. Verify that your offer is recorded as submitted and that the attachments are all there. That check takes a minute and it is the only one that counts afterwards.

After the deadline

A missed deadline cannot be undone — not by us either. If it happens, contact the buying organisation; whether and how things continue is their decision and depends on the procurement rules that apply to them.

As the software vendor we cannot extend a deadline, add an offer after the fact, or intervene in a running procedure.