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Commercial evaluation is where the cost team turns bidder pricing into defensible award evidence. TruBuild extracts line items from each contractor’s priced submission, aligns them against your bill of quantities (BOQ), and gives you a ranked, line-by-line comparison with pricing quality flags: unpriced items, exclusions, and divisions priced well above or below the market. This matters because a low headline total is not a low evaluated price. A bid that excludes scope, leaves provisional items unpriced, or hides anomalous unit rates shifts risk back to the owner. The comparison surfaces those gaps before they become award-stage surprises.
If you do not see commercial evaluation in your workspace, contact TruBuild support to request the feature for your organization.

Who this is for

Access levels control what each user can do. Users with full or commercial access can create rounds, upload files, and edit overrides. Users with viewer access can review results and download exports but cannot make changes; disabled actions show a Read-only access tooltip. See Evaluation governance for the full access model.

What you need

At least one vendor must have files before you can run an evaluation. Excel submissions extract most reliably, so insist on your BOQ template in the RFP pack wherever you can.

Where commercial evaluation fits in the tender cycle

Before TruBuild

The traditional commercial evaluation flow for a 6-bidder tender on a 1,000-line BOQ:
1

Collect bids

Vendor Excel and PDF submissions arrive over email, each with different column orders, units, and formatting.
2

Build a master comparison sheet

A cost manager spends 3 to 5 days copy-pasting vendor prices into a master Excel next to the reference BOQ. Every vendor’s line order is different, so most of the time goes into lining things up.
3

Spot-check with formulas

Conditional formatting highlights cells above or below average. Formulas break every time someone inserts a row.
4

Manually identify outliers and queries

An analyst scrolls the sheet looking for suspicious numbers and types them into a separate clarification tracker.
5

Produce the comparison report

Copy and paste into slides, recreate charts, then redo everything from scratch when Round 2 arrives.
Typical pain points: the master sheet becomes the single source of truth, one bad cell can change the awarded vendor, there is no audit trail, and every clarification cycle means redoing the work.

Run a commercial evaluation

You run commercial evaluations per asset within a package. From the package’s commercial page, click Run New Round to open the evaluation wizard. From an asset’s results page you can also click Create and run evaluation. The wizard has two steps.

Step 1: General information

1

Check the asset details

The Asset name and Number of instances fields are shown read-only. The instance count is the quantity of identical asset units and it multiplies rolled-up totals.
2

Upload the Bill of Quantities (BOQ)

Drop the BOQ into the Bill of Quantities (BOQ) upload zone. This is required. The label shows Complete once a file is attached.
3

Upload the Pre-Tender Estimate (PTE)

Optionally drop your estimate into the Pre-Tender Estimate (PTE) zone. Uploading a PTE unlocks the benchmark row in the ranking table and the deviation-from-PTE chart.

Step 2: Vendor files

1

Upload each contractor's submission

The Vendor Files section lists every contractor on the package with its own upload zone. Drop each contractor’s priced submission against the correct contractor. Multi-file uploads, folders, and ZIP archives are supported.
2

Check coverage

The header shows how many vendors have files, for example Vendor Files (4/6 vendors). At least one vendor must have files to run the evaluation.
3

Start the run

Click Create and run evaluation. TruBuild confirms with “Commercial evaluation started” and the round moves to Analyzing. Extraction and comparison run in the background, so you can leave the page and come back.
Keep revised-round files out of the initial round. When clarification responses arrive, create a new round instead of adding files to the old one, so the movement between rounds stays auditable.

Round statuses

Review the Pricing Overview

Once results are ready, the package-level Pricing Overview page gives you the comparative picture across all evaluated assets and contractors. A status banner at the top tells you where the package stands:

Key metrics

Five cards summarize the commercial position: A wide cost spread is itself a finding. It usually means bidders read the scope differently, and it is worth resolving through clarifications before you trust the ranking.

Bidder ranking

The Bidder Ranking table lists every contractor with:
  • Rank: position by total cost
  • Bidder: contractor name, with Lowest, Highest, or Unpriced badges
  • Total Cost: the contractor’s evaluated total
  • Score: 100% for the lowest bid, proportional for the rest
  • vs. Lowest: percentage above the lowest bid (the lowest bid shows Baseline)
Contractors that submitted no usable pricing appear grayed out with an Unpriced badge. If you uploaded a PTE, it appears as its own row with a Benchmark badge so you can see where your estimate sits in the bid field.

Bid quality scorecards

Two cards grade each vendor’s submission with a letter grade (A to F, labeled Excellent to Critical) and a 0 to 100 score bar. Use the arrows to page through vendors. These grades are the fastest route to your commercial clarification list. A vendor with a low Submission Quality grade needs exclusions and unpriced scope resolved before its total means anything. A low Pricing Integrity grade often signals front-loading or a scope misread.

Charts

  • Cost Distribution per Asset: a stacked bar per contractor showing what percentage each asset contributes to that contractor’s total bid. Useful for spotting a bidder who loaded one building or zone disproportionately.
  • Deviation from PTE: per-asset bars showing how far each vendor sits above or below your estimate, with reference lines at 0% and plus or minus 5%. Shown only if you uploaded a PTE.
  • Pricing behaviour: a breakdown of each vendor’s divisions into Underpriced, In Range, and Overpriced.

Work the line-by-line comparison

Open an asset from the Pricing Overview to reach the vendor comparison table. This is where evaluators spend most of their time, working from the largest variances and highest-value lines down.

Table structure

The table follows the BOQ hierarchy:
  • Division headers with per-vendor totals and lowest/highest indicators
  • Grouping sub-headers with subtotals
  • Line items with item ID, description, quantity, unit, per-vendor pricing, PTE pricing (if provided), lowest, highest, and variance percentage

Controls

Highlighting

  • Lowest bidder cells are highlighted green, highest in red.
  • Lines with variance above threshold are flagged amber or red depending on severity.
  • Exclusions and unpriced items carry badges and feed the Submission Quality grade.
  • Values TruBuild filled in rather than extracted directly appear dimmed and marked Imputed. Treat these as candidates for verification, not settled facts.

Overrides, notes, and source checks

On any line you can:
  • Edit an override (pencil icon) to correct a vendor amount or rename an item when extraction misread the source. Overrides feed the Normalized bid mode and are preserved on the round.
  • Delete an override (trash icon) to revert to the extracted value.
  • Add a note for other evaluators.
  • Open the source document to check the vendor’s original page before overriding. Always verify against the source: the whole point of the audit trail is that every adjusted number traces back to evidence.

Export the comparison

Click Export Comparison in the toolbar on the asset’s commercial detail page. Before exporting you can choose:
  • Which vendors to include
  • Rate or Amount price display
  • Whether to include the PTE
  • Received or Normalized bid mode
The export is an Excel workbook containing: TruBuild confirms the download with “Comparison exported successfully”. The filename follows the pattern <asset name>_Commercial_Comparison_<round name>.xlsx, so exports from different assets and rounds never get confused in the committee pack. Viewers can export too, so a committee reviewer with read-only access can pull their own snapshot. Export before every committee session so reviewers work from a fixed file rather than a live screen.

Run additional rounds

Clarification responses and revised offers belong in new rounds, not edits to old ones. In construction procurement, the movement between rounds is often the evidence: what changed, why it changed, and whether a clarification improved or weakened the bid.
1

Create the next round

Click Run New Round on the commercial page. Rounds default to “Round 1”, “Round 2”, and so on, but you can rename them. “Round 2 - post-clarifications” is a good convention.
2

Upload the revised submissions

Attach each contractor’s revised priced files in the wizard and run the evaluation as before.
3

Compare against the prior round

Use the round dropdown to switch between rounds. Check total bid movement, previously unpriced lines now priced, new or withdrawn exclusions, and rates that moved materially after clarification.
See Rounds and clarifications for round naming conventions and how commercial and technical rounds interact.

Best practices

Every hour you invest forcing a clean, consistent BOQ template saves multiples in alignment fixing. Watch provisional sums, dayworks, and contingency lines in particular: vendors interpret them differently, and clean labels in your BOQ prevent most of the noise.
Big totals are not what wins or loses a tender; big deltas are. A line with high variance is where the market disagrees, and where your evaluator’s judgment matters most.
A bid with unresolved exclusions or unpriced items has an artificially low total. Use the Submission Quality detail to build the contractor’s clarification list, then re-evaluate in the next round.
Dimmed imputed values and manual overrides are the two places a comparison can drift from the actual bids. Open the source document link before you rely on either.
Keep each round intact. Committees and auditors care about the movement between rounds as much as the final numbers.

Rounds and clarifications

How initial submissions, clarification cycles, and revised offers map to rounds.

Award readiness

Turn the latest reviewed commercial round into a committee-ready award record.

Technical evaluation

Score contractor technical submissions alongside the commercial comparison.

Evaluation governance

Access levels, audit trail, and controls across the evaluation.