Tracking every tender in preparation
How a South African firm keeps track of every tender it is preparing, who owns each one and which milestones are overdue, using the Delivery Tracker.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa
Bids rarely fail on the day they close. They fail a fortnight earlier, when the tax compliance PIN was not requested, the briefing session was missed, or the person who was meant to prepare the pricing schedule went on leave and nobody noticed. By the closing date, the problem is visible to everyone and fixable by no one.
A firm preparing several tenders at once needs one view of all of them: who owns each, what stage it is at, and which milestones have slipped. This article covers why bids slip, how Achekam's Delivery Tracker shows the bids in preparation, which menu entries to avoid, and how to run a short weekly bid meeting around it.
Why bids slip
Most late bids share a few causes:
- No single owner. Several people contribute, and each assumes someone else is watching the dates.
- Late compliance documents. Registrations, tax status and declarations that depend on outside bodies take longer than expected.
- Compulsory briefings missed. A tender with a compulsory briefing session cannot be bid if nobody attended.
- Pricing left to the end. The schedule that needs the most review is done in the last two days.
- Lodgement assumed. The pack was sent, but nobody confirmed the buyer received it.
Each of these is a milestone problem, and each can be caught early if someone looks at all the bids in one place every week.
The Delivery Tracker
Achekam's Delivery Tracker lists every tender being prepared, with its owner, its stage and its overdue milestones. It is the one screen to open when the question is "where are we on all our bids?"
The tenders reach it from Tender Intelligence. Achekam's tender scout reads live adverts from the National Treasury eTenders public data feed and from any public RSS or Atom feed the firm adds, and staff can also enter a tender by hand with its documents. Sources such as CIDB, Transnet and Eskom are shown as not connected, so tenders from those buyers must be entered by hand. An RSS tender with no closing date is given one 30 days after publication; check the real closing date in the tender documents and correct it.
A note on the recommended list feeding the pipeline: the tender "AI Match" score and the Recommended list come from fixed keyword, sector, province and value rules applied to the firm's search profile, not from an AI model.
Owners, stages and overdue milestones
Give every tender one owner from the moment the firm decides to bid. Before that decision, Achekam requires a reason for every bid/no-bid decision, and a decision to bid on a tender of R5 million or more must name an active partner as approver. That threshold is fixed in code at R5 million whatever the Tender Settings show. Bid/no-bid decisions covers the decision itself.
Then set milestones working back from the closing date. A typical set for a professional services tender:
| Milestone | Typically owned by |
|---|---|
| Compulsory briefing attended | Bid owner |
| Tax compliance status and registration documents current | Bid administrator |
| Key personnel and CVs confirmed | Bid owner |
| Methodology drafted and reviewed | Engagement partner |
| Pricing schedule built and approved | Bid owner and partner |
| Pack assembled and checked against the returnable list | Bid administrator |
| Pack submitted and lodgement verified | Bid administrator and a colleague |
Tax compliance status deserves an early slot. SARS explains how to manage your Tax Compliance Status: requesting a status and PIN on eFiling, which replaced the paper tax clearance certificate, including the Good Standing option used for tenders.
At the end, Achekam can e-mail the bid pack to the address the tender prescribes once a person has confirmed it, and records delivery and downloads, while a colleague still verifies lodgement against the buyer's acknowledgement. Make that verification the final milestone, and do not close a bid until it is done.
Menu entries that show the same list
Three tender menu entries do not do what their names say, and they can confuse a team trying to find the right view:
- Procurement Plans is always empty.
- Sources Registry shows the full tender list, not a registry of sources.
- Awaiting Documents shows the same tenders as Submission Due.
Several Tender Settings tabs also save values that nothing in Achekam reads. Tell the team to use the Delivery Tracker as the single view of bids in preparation, and not to rely on those entries or settings.
A weekly bid meeting
A short weekly meeting, with the Delivery Tracker on screen, keeps every bid moving:
- Go through each tender in the tracker in order of closing date.
- For each, the owner reports the stage and any overdue milestone.
- Every overdue milestone gets a new date and a named person before the meeting moves on.
- Decide whether any bid should be stopped, and record the reason.
- Check that last week's submitted bids have verified lodgement.
Fifteen minutes is usually enough. The value comes from doing it every week, not from the length.
Keep a short record of each meeting: the bids discussed, the milestones moved and the decisions taken. Over a season, that record shows which milestones slip most often, which is the most useful thing a firm can learn about its own bidding. If the compliance documents are late on every bid, the fix is to keep them current all year, not to start them earlier on each tender. To see what each bid is costing in staff time, read knowing what a bid cost the firm.
Starting on Monday
Open the Delivery Tracker, confirm every tender in preparation has an owner, and add the milestones from the table for any bid that has none. Then put the weekly bid meeting in the diary at a fixed time.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
