Evaluation rounds

Construction procurement rarely moves from first bid to award in one pass. Most packages go through an initial submission, compliance review, clarification questions (PTCs and tender queries), contractor responses, revised commercial or technical positions, and sometimes a final offer or BAFO-style round before award recommendation. TruBuild models this with rounds inside each evaluation workflow. The package is the common container for contractors, weights, documents, tender queries, and the award record. Inside that package, commercial evaluation keeps its own round history and technical evaluation keeps its own round history. Each new round is a fresh snapshot; earlier rounds stay intact for audit. That separation matters in practice. A commercial team may run a second round after revised priced BOQs arrive, while the technical team keeps its existing scores because the clarification did not touch technical criteria. The reverse also happens: a technical PTC can trigger a new technical round without changing the commercial comparison.

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Common construction procurement sequence

Not every package needs every step. A simple low-risk package may stop after one round. A complex MEP, facade, civil works, or specialist systems package may need several clarification cycles.

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What a round represents

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Commercial round statuses

Every commercial round carries a status badge so the team knows whether results are trustworthy yet: Setup while the round is queued, Analyzing while extraction and comparison run (with live per-vendor progress), Ready when results are available, and Failed with a Retry action if the run errors. The full status reference is in Commercial evaluation. Do not circulate results from a round that is still Analyzing. Totals and rankings are only complete once the round reaches Ready. Technical rounds move through their own analysis and score-review flow, described in Technical evaluation.

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Run a new commercial round

Run a new commercial round whenever the commercial basis changes: revised priced BOQs after PTC responses, corrected arithmetic, newly priced scope, an addendum that changes quantities, or a final offer. From the package’s commercial page, click Run New Round and work through the same wizard used for the first round: upload the commercial basis (the BOQ, and optionally the PTE), attach each contractor’s revised files against the correct contractor, and click Create and run evaluation. The wizard is covered step by step in Commercial evaluation.

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Switch between rounds

Each evaluated asset keeps its full round history. Use the round dropdown at the top of the results page to move between rounds; each option shows the round number and name, for example “Round 2: post-clarifications”. Selecting an earlier round shows that round’s comparison exactly as it was run, including its overrides and notes. The package Pricing Overview dashboard aggregates the latest results across assets, so use the round dropdown on the asset page when you need to inspect a specific historical position.

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Compare commercial rounds

When a new round reaches Ready, compare it against the previous reviewed position before treating it as the new commercial basis. Switch between rounds with the dropdown and check:

• Total bid movement per contractor, and movement in rank
• New exclusions or qualifications that were not in the prior round
• Previously unpriced lines that are now priced (and at what rate)
• Rates that moved materially after clarification, especially on high-value trades
• Provisional sums, dayworks, preliminaries, and prime cost items
• Whether a contractor that was commercially non-compliant is now compliant

A bid that drops sharply between rounds deserves as much scrutiny as one that rises. Check whether the reduction came from genuine re-pricing or from new exclusions that shift scope risk back to the employer.

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Export each round for the record

Click Export Comparison on the asset’s commercial detail page to download the round as an Excel workbook. The filename includes the round name, so exports from different rounds never get confused in the committee pack. The export options (contractor selection, rate or amount, PTE column, received or normalized bids) are described in Commercial evaluation. Export the reviewed position of each round and keep both with the award pack. The committee should review fixed snapshots, not a live screen.

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Track the clarifications between rounds

The commercial clarification questions raised in a round can be exported as an Excel workbook named <asset name>_PTC_Questions_<round name>.xlsx. It lists each question per contractor with the item reference, the vendor’s response, and a status (pending, clarified, or closed), categorized by issue type: exclusions, unpriced items, deviations, pricing anomalies, and arithmetic checks. Filed alongside the round exports, it documents why the next round was needed.

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Technical rounds

Technical rounds preserve technical scoring at each stage of the tender. The first technical round is always labelled Initial Submission; it sets the criteria and the baseline scores. Each PTC round after it (labelled Round 1, Round 2, and so on) inherits the criteria from the previous round, so the scoring basis stays consistent. Common triggers for a new technical PTC round:

• Contractor provides missing method statements, programme details, resources, HSE, QA/QC, or design clarifications
• Technical PTC responses affect specific criteria
• Revised submissions change the technical basis

A PTC round has three setup steps: Round setup (choose whether to carry the clarification items from the prior round or upload the PTCs you issued), Response files, and Affected criteria. For the full walkthrough, see Technical evaluation.

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Rerun or carry forward

Avoid blindly re-scoring every criterion after every clarification. For each affected contractor and criterion, decide whether to Rerun (the response materially changes the evidence for the criterion) or Carry Forward (the response does not change the score basis). Each decision carries a rationale, so the round record shows why unaffected scores were preserved. The decision workflow is covered in Technical evaluation.

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Compare technical rounds

After a PTC round completes, rerun criteria show delta badges against the prior round, and the contractor leaderboard shows total-score deltas, so you can see at a glance which contractor gained or lost ground after clarifications. The technical results workbook lists every round with its type, each contractor’s score per round, and the net change in ranking between rounds, which makes round-over-round movement easy to present to a committee. See Technical evaluation for the full scoring walkthrough.

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Recommended commercial round naming

TruBuild names commercial rounds “Round 1”, “Round 2”, and so on by default, and lets you customize the name. Use names that make sense in a committee pack without opening the system: Avoid names like test, rerun, new, or final final. They make audit review harder. The round name also appears in export filenames, so a clear name keeps the committee pack self-explanatory. Technical rounds are labelled automatically, and organization admins can standardize custom technical round labels in Settings.

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Tender queries and PTCs

Tender queries and PTCs are the bridge between rounds: In most construction procurement processes, a clarification response that changes the tender basis should be issued as a circular or addendum to all affected tenderers. TruBuild maintains the query record; the procurement team still owns fairness, equal treatment, and formal issue through the approved channel. See Tender queries for the query register, approvals, and circular generation.

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Round controls

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Typical pitfalls

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