From the tender landing to the bid going in
Six things, in the order you do them. All six are built and running today, and every figure on this page says where it came from.
Every open tender, in one list, every six hours
2,113 public tenders were open and held as of 24 August 2026: every federal notice, and every Québec public body — municipalities, health authorities, school boards, transport.
You can also paste in a notice from your own MERX account. It is checked, calendared and recorded exactly like the rest, inside your company only.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYAn illustration of the Opportunities screen. The tenders and figures are examples, not a customer's.
Clear to bid, worth a look, and everything you were never going to pursue — behind a count, not in front of you.
If a feed misses a cycle you are told, on the screen. It never quietly shows you yesterday and lets you assume it is today.
Only for tenders that are clear or worth a look, and never for the backlog that was already there when you signed up. You can turn it off.
Everything that can disqualify a bid, checked first
A keyword search matches words. This reads what the work actually is, then checks the seven things that decide whether you can bid it at all — and quotes the sentence behind every one.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYTwo requirements fail and one needs a decision. Everything else passes. Blocked is still worth reading — this is how you find out which two things stand between you and the work.
An illustration of a tender and its requirement checks. The tender, the clauses and the figures are examples, not a customer's.
What the job is, read before any keyword. How the buyer filed the notice is weaker evidence than what they wrote — it produces a lead, never a match.
Real road kilometres from your yard against the radius you set. A provincial line is not a distance: Kenora is closer to Winnipeg than Dauphin is.
COR and SECOR against Manitoba's $100,000 threshold, plus whatever the document itself demands. A clause offering COR or SECOR is one requirement, not two.
Against the single-job limit your surety has given you. A bond you cannot post is a bid you cannot submit, so it blocks rather than warns.
Closings, question deadlines, registration and mandatory site visits. The site visit is the quiet one — miss it and you cannot bid whatever the closing date says.
Insurance limits, liquidated damages, holdback, bid validity, prime-contractor designation, subcontractor lists, safety plans.
A blank field never hides work from you
When something is genuinely unknown, the answer is “worth a look” and never “no”. It tells you what it would need to settle the question, and usually you can answer in one click.
It asks the question that opens up the most work first, remembers your answer, and re-scores every tender that was waiting on it. It never asks the same question twice.
- Ambiguity produces “worth a look”, never “clear to bid”
- Every answer is dated and can be changed later
- “Not sure” is a real answer, stored as one, and nothing is guessed from it
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYFourteen open tenders are waiting on this. Until it is answered they stay in “worth a look” rather than being ruled in or out, because a blank field is never treated as a no.
“Not sure” is a real answer and is stored as one. It is never asked again, and nothing is guessed from it.
An illustration of the question card. The count and the figures are examples.
What an hour of your crew actually costs
Almost no tender notice says what the contract is worth — none of 950 federal notices, and 2% of 291 Québec ones. So the number that matters is your own.
Wages, labour burden, overhead and the hours your crew does not bill. Setting it up is three questions, not forty, and every figure says whether it came from you or from a default.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYAn illustration of the cost breakdown. The figures are an example — yours are built from your own numbers.
Before this was built, 20,000 versions of a ten-person Manitoba mechanical shop were simulated to find out which numbers actually move an hourly cost and which barely matter. One input — how much of a paid week your crew really bills — carried 54.8% of the swing on its own. That is why it is asked first. With nothing supplied the model sits about 9.7% away from a fully specified one; with the top three answered, about 2.1%.
Those two percentages compare the model against itself across simulated companies. They are a study of which questions are worth asking, not a measurement of accuracy against any real company’s books — and nothing here will present them as one.
It will not tell you what to bid. Recommended price bands were built here and measured against 33 Manitoba construction awards, which turned out to span a 6.2x range nationally. There is not enough public data to produce one honestly, so the feature was removed rather than shipped with a caveat.
Know what changed, and what it means for your bid
A buyer can issue three addendums in two weeks. Each has to be acknowledged on the bid form, and a bid that acknowledges two of three is thrown out on compliance — with nobody telling you which one you missed.
The original requirement, as it stood when you first priced the job.
Both values, side by side, with the clause quoted — and which earlier addendum it supersedes.
Your priced schedule, your bond, your acknowledgements — marked, not silently recalculated.
- Received, read, reviewed and acknowledged are kept as four separate facts
- One line on the tender and on the package: current through addendum 3, or exactly what is outstanding
- It will not re-price a revised drawing for you — a person does that
- Where two documents disagree about a date and we cannot tell which wins, it says so and asks you to check, rather than quietly choosing one
Addendum tracking is part of the Bid and Win plans.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYAn illustration of an addendum changeset. The values are examples.
The dates that end a bid before it starts
Closings, question deadlines, registration windows and mandatory site visits, in one list, for every tender you are looking at.
The site visit is the one that costs people work. It is often three or four days after the notice appears, and if nobody from your company attends, your bid cannot be accepted no matter how good it is.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYAn illustration of the deadline calendar. The dates and jobs are examples.
Assembled from what you already have on file
Your company details, your insurance certificate, your priced schedule, your certificates. What is missing is listed as missing rather than filled in with a plausible guess that gets signed without being read.
It also says which addendum the package is current through, on the sheet itself. And it never submits anything — not behind a confirmation, not behind a setting. You sign and send.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYAn illustration of the bid package. The contents are an example.
What you decided, who decided it, and why
Bid, no bid, won, lost — each with the person who decided, the date, and the reasoning as it stood on the day. Printable.
A COR auditor asks how safety and legislative requirements are considered before work is taken on. The jobs you turned down are the evidence, and in most companies they leave no trace anywhere.
BidCaliperOpportunitiesWhat's comingAdd a tenderYour shopDecision recordYOUR COMPANYAn illustration of the decision record. The jobs, names and dates are examples.
Where a person stays in charge
The software does the reading and the arithmetic. Every decision, and every document that leaves your office, is yours.
- It reads
Every tender, every six hours, plus whatever you bring in.
- It checks
Against your company, with the clause quoted for every finding.
- You decide
Bid, no bid, or answer the question that settles it.
- You send
It prepares the package. It never files anything.
Four things it will not do
Most of what makes software like this trustworthy is what it refuses to do. These are rules in the code, not intentions.
Every finding carries its reason and the sentence from the document it came from.
When something is missing it says so. Unclear becomes “worth a look”, never “clear to bid”.
Not behind a confirmation, not behind a setting. You sign and send.
What you upload stays inside your company. A standing check plants a decoy and fails if it ever crosses to another.
See it against your own company
Three minutes to set up, and it scores today's live tenders while you watch.