01The two bids
Reading thisTwo contractors' priced bills, side by side. They do not need the same wording, the same order, or the same number of lines — pairing them is the job. Paste the rows, drop a CSV, or drop the PDF the contractor actually sent you.
Bidder A
Paste CSV, or drop a .csv or .pdf bill here. A PDF is read in this tab and turned into the rows below, so you can see and correct exactly what was read before anything is levelled.
Bidder B
Same shape. The two bills do not have to be in the same order or use the same wording.
02The comparison
Reading thisThe headline numbers, as the two bidders submitted them — nothing adjusted, nothing levelled. The spread is the gap you are being asked to explain, and the rest of this page is about how much of it is real.
03Every line, and how sure we are about it
Reading thisEvery line in both bills, and which of three states it is in. Paired means the same item was found in both bids. Needs a look means we paired them but are not certain enough to act on it without your eyes. Not priced by both means one bidder carried the item and the other did not — usually the most expensive thing on the page.
| Bidder A — | Bidder B — | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Line | Description | Unit | Qty | Rate | Amount | Qty | Rate | Amount | State | |
A hatched band across a bidder's three columns means that bidder has no such line at all — a different fact from a zero, and the one worth chasing. A value marked in m2 means the bidder did price the item, but measured it in another unit, so the two are not comparable until one of them is restated.
How sureEach line is scored once from each bill's side, so there are twice as many scores here as there are lines. The point is the bottom two rows: nothing is paired below the confidence floor, and anything we were not sure about is labelled rather than quietly presented as fact. A matcher that guesses and stays silent is the thing this replaces.
04What to query, ranked by what it is worth
Reading thisThe actual output: what to put to each contractor, ordered by how much money turns on the answer. The figure on the right is what is at stake if the query goes your way — not a penalty, and not a saving until someone agrees it.
05The report, drawn on your two bills
Reading thisWhat the sections above are actually for. The preliminaries and provisional-sum analysis is its own view, followed by the documents a tender evaluation produces: the comparison, the levelling schedule, a separate query schedule for each contractor, and the recommendation. They are on screen and nothing more — there is no download here, nothing is saved, and none of it can be sent. What an account buys is the file you can actually issue and the record of who answered it.
06How often this gets it wrong
Reading thisHow often the pairing above misses a line the two bills actually shared. Every tool that does this job gets some of them wrong; almost none of them will tell you the number. This one is measured on a real tender, checked by hand, and printed on a public page where anyone can hold us to it.
Measured, not asserted
The number is not the claim. Anything that pairs two bills will miss some of them; what almost nothing in this market does is count the misses and print the total. That is the whole of it — this does not pretend to be error-free, it keeps score, publishes the score, and marks the lines it is unsure about instead of presenting a guess as a finding.
07Where this stops, and what is behind the account
Reading thisWhat this free page deliberately does not do, and why. Everything on the list needs somewhere to keep things — a saved tender, a record of who changed what, a file you can send a contractor — and somewhere to keep things needs an account. It is listed here rather than discovered after you have done an afternoon's work.
Stated up front, not discovered later
- No rate library. The bidders are checked against each other and nothing else. There is no cost book on this page and there never will be — it holds real project rates that belong to the client who paid for them.
- Two bidders is the floor, and it is a real limit. With only two bills there is no way to tell a cheap bid from a mistaken one: a single very low rate simply becomes the reference and makes the other bidder look expensive. A third bid, or a benchmark, is what settles it.
- No saving, no resuming, no sharing. Nothing is stored, so there is nothing to come back to, invite a colleague into, or hand to a validator.
- No paper. The levelling schedule, both query schedules and the recommendation are drawn above on your own numbers, and they stay on this screen. There is nothing to download, and no file to send a contractor — which is the thing a query schedule exists to be. A document you can issue, and a record of who answered it, is what the account is.
- No audit trail. Every adjustment in a levelling schedule needs a source, a method and a date behind it. That needs a record, and a record needs an account.
- No technical scoring, so no recommendation. A most-economically-advantageous award is a technical score and a price score combined at a ratio fixed before the bids were opened. This page has the price half and none of the rest, so the recommendation above renders its technical half empty and refuses to produce a number. Scoring price alone and calling it a recommendation is the failure the product exists to prevent.
- Levelling adjustments here have no independent estimate behind them. A real levelling schedule sources each adjustment from a quantity surveyor's estimate or a rate library, and neither is on this page. Where an adjustment can only come from the other bidder's own price, the schedule says so; where it cannot be sourced at all, the row is shown empty and counted rather than filled in with a guess.
- No arithmetic checks and no cross-document reading. Those read across a whole tender and the documents behind it, not two spreadsheets.
None of it is withheld to make a point. Each one is a thing that cannot exist without a place to store it and a record of who did it — and that is the whole of what an account buys.