In this article, we will go over how to enable questions and answers for your tender and how to answer questions asked by the bidders.
Using the questions and answers feature you can easily manage questions from the bidders for your tender with several options on how to provide answers.
Enable and set up questions and answers
User rights
Activation of questions and answers happens individually for each tender and needs to be done by a user in the 'Tender responsibles' user group.
To enable questions and answers, check the 'Enable questions and answers' box in the tender creation window (if the tender has already been created, you can select it and click on Edit):
Tips and tricks
Bidders will not be able to send questions until the tender has started.
Public questions
Questions are private by default, meaning only the Tender Responsible can view them.
Check the 'Public questions' box to allow all bidders and observers to see the questions.
Note that only the question content is visible; the identity of the bidder who asked the question remains anonymous.
Question deadline
A question deadline can be set to indicate a cut-off date for questions entitled to answers. You can toggle whether bidders should be allowed to send questions after the deadline or not.
Manage questions
Answering questions can be done in a couple of different ways.
No matter how questions are answered, the answer will be visible to every bidder invited to the tender.
General answer
To make a general answer to a question, go to Questions/Answers
New.
Then fill in a title and contents for the answer:
General answers are always published immediately upon sending and cannot be set as private.
Reply to questions
If you want to reply directly to a specific question, you can choose to publish a question before answering it. Publishing a question makes it visible to all bidders in the project, however, the bidder information will remain hidden.
Important
The contents of the question will still be published, thus if a bidder has included their information in the question, it will be published with the question.
To publish a question select it and click Publish question or open the question by either double-clicking it or selecting it and clicking
Show.
When the question has been published, you can reply to the question.
This will open a window where you can reply directly. Fill in the answer and click 'Send':
The answer will be displayed as a direct reply in the list view for the questions, by being marked with a 'Re:' as a prefix to the title and an indent for the entry:
Read more
If you want to learn more about creating a tender, read this article: How to create a Tender.