Managing Bids & Vendor Submissions

Everything about bidders and their quotes, from the Conexus side. The headline difference from BMS is that suppliers now enter their own numbers, and a submitted quote locks — so knowing how to unlock one is part of the job. That's covered in Quote locking and unlocking.

The Bidders tab

Bidders live on the Bidders tab of the Purchase Request. Two buttons top-right: Add Bidder (the +) and Upload Bid (the upload arrow).

Two bidders added, neither has quoted yet.

💡 Pro Tip: Sort by Amount (Low → High) to line the quotes up cheapest first. This is how you compare bids in COMS — there's no heatmap or comparison chart yet. The module-wide Quotes & Proposals tab does the same across all PRs.

⚠️ Heads up: The Amount column is not currency-converted. A USD quote and a CAD quote sit in the same column and sort against each other as raw numbers. Check each bid's currency before you conclude one is cheaper.

Adding a bidder

Add Bidder opens a short form.

The Add Bidder form. The vendor's default address appears under the Vendor field.

⚠️ Heads up: If the supplier isn't in the Vendor list, the company doesn't exist in COMS yet. Add it under Procurement → Companies if you have access, or ask Finance. Don't work around it by picking a similar company.

💡 Pro Tip: Need a contact that isn't listed? Use Add New Contact at the bottom of the Contact dropdown — it opens in a new tab. Add the contact, come back, and click the small refresh icon next to the Contact label (not your browser's reload) to pull in the new list without losing what you've typed.

ℹ️ Good to know: You don't need a Scope of Work per bidder. The PR's Scope of Work applies to all of them.

Getting quotes in

There are two routes, and they're both normal:

Reviewing what a supplier sent

Click the bidder name, then the Quote/Proposal Details tab.

A submitted quote as Conexus sees it.

You get the quote dates and currency, the attached documents, every quoted line with unit cost, quantity, HST and total, any additional costs, and the grand total.

Updating costs yourself

Update Costs (from the bidder page or the Bidders row menu) opens the cost editor. Every item on the PR gets a row, whether the supplier quoted it or not. Set the currency, the quote dates, and per line the quantity offered, unit cost and HST.

ℹ️ Good to know: HST is auto-calculated at 13% of unit cost × quantity while the Auto toggle is on. Switch it off to type a different figure — for example a supplier who is quoting GST only, or no tax at all.

Below the items you can add Additional Costs — freight, setup, and so on. Each needs a Type; the title, description and amount are optional.

⚠️ Heads up: The Type field on an additional cost is required by the server but isn't marked required on the form. A row with an empty Type makes the whole save fail without a clear message — fill in Type on every row.

Uploading a bid file, and AI cost extraction

Upload Bid attaches a supplier's quote document to a bidder. Pick the bidder (you must have created it first — upload can't create one), attach the file, and optionally turn on AI Extraction to have COMS read the costs out of the document and pre-fill the line items.

Allowed types are PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, text and PowerPoint, up to 25 MB.

• Pages — narrow the extraction to the pages with the pricing (e.g. 1, 3, 5-10). It's faster and more accurate.
• Advanced — for PDFs with complex tables (merged cells, multi-line rows). Slower but better on awkward layouts.

For a file that's already attached, use Extract Cost From File from the row menu instead.

⚠️ Heads up: Always check AI-extracted figures before saving. COMS says so too (“Costs were auto-extracted and may not be 100% accurate”). Extraction commonly confuses a unit price with a line total. The extracted numbers appear as clickable chips on each row so you can see what it found and pick the right one.

ℹ️ Good to know: AI extraction needs the PR to have items — it matches the document against them. On a PR with no items you'll get “This purchase request doesn't have any items. Please add items before proceeding.”

Documents on a bid

Each bid has one main document — the supplier's quote — and any number of supporting documents.

⚠️ Heads up: You must upload the main document before you can add supporting ones. Until then COMS tells you so and the Add Supporting Document button is disabled.

On the main document you can view the latest version or all versions, extract costs from it, replace it (the old file stays in version history) or delete it. A badge shows where it came from: BMS, Internal or External — “External” meaning the supplier uploaded it themselves.

Supporting documents can be viewed, marked as the main document (which swaps the current main into the supporting list — nothing is lost), or deleted.

Files marked “from BMS”

Some rows carry a from BMS tag and have no edit actions, only viewing. These are bid documents uploaded in BMS that COMS has no record of belonging to this bid. COMS shows them here as a convenience, and only when the PR has a single bidder — with two or more bidders there's no way to tell whose quote a legacy file belongs to, so they're hidden.

ℹ️ Good to know: Because COMS can't confirm the file belongs to this bid, it won't promote or delete it on the bid's behalf. To work with those files properly, go to the PR's Documents tab.

Quote locking and unlocking

This is the part with no equivalent in BMS, so it's worth reading even if the rest felt familiar.

What locking is, and why

When a supplier presses Submit Quote on the external portal, COMS stamps the submission time and their quote becomes read-only to them. They can still see everything and re-download their own file, but they cannot change a number, a date, or the attached document.

The point is integrity: once a price is in, the supplier can't quietly revise it while you're evaluating.

How to tell a quote is locked

The Vendor Submitted At column on the Bidders tab. A timestamp means locked; a dash means still open to the supplier.

Dell has submitted — note the timestamp and the amount. Alithya has not.

ℹ️ Good to know: Locking only restrains the supplier. Conexus staff can still edit a locked quote — Update Costs, Edit General Info, replace documents and so on all keep working. So if you just need to correct a typo on their behalf, you don't need to unlock anything.

Unlocking a quote so the supplier can re-submit

Unlock when the supplier genuinely needs to change their own submission — they quoted the wrong model, missed a line, or you've revised the scope and want fresh pricing.

On the Bidders tab, open the row menu for that bidder and choose Unlock Quote. It only appears on bids that are actually locked.

The Bidders row menu. Unlock Quote appears only once the supplier has submitted.

Confirm the dialog:

The unlock confirmation.

Two things then happen together:

1. The submission lock is cleared — Vendor Submitted At goes back to a dash and the supplier can edit and submit again.
2. The latest RFX is automatically re-emailed to the bidder's contact, with a fresh one-time sign-in link.

You'll see “Quote unlocked and RFX resent to vendor successfully.”

⚠️ Heads up: Unlocking requires an RFX on that bid. Because unlock and re-send are one action, a bid that never had an RFX can't be unlocked — you'll get “No RFX found for this bid. Cannot resend to vendor.” Generate or upload an RFX for that bidder first, then unlock. The same applies if the contact's email is invalid: fix the contact, then unlock.

ℹ️ Good to know: Nothing is wiped. The supplier's previous costs, dates, additional costs and uploaded file all stay exactly as they were — they amend on top of what they submitted before. There's no revision number and no side-by-side history of previous submissions, so if the before-and-after matters to you, record the old figures on the Notes tab before you unlock.

💡 Pro Tip: The supplier's only notification of an unlock is that re-sent RFQ email, which reads like a fresh invitation to bid rather than “we've reopened your quote”. Send them a quick note explaining what you'd like changed — or use the Additional message box if you re-send the RFX manually instead.

When Unlock Quote disappears

The option is only there while you can still edit the bid. It vanishes once:

• the Bidder List or SSJ approval has been approved, or
• the PR is Ready for Purchase or already has a Purchase Order.

At that point only a super-admin can unlock, and the menu item is labelled Force Unlock Quote in red. If you need a supplier to re-quote late in the process, ask a super-admin — and expect to explain why, because the surrounding record is already approved.

ℹ️ Good to know: Unlocking is recorded in the audit trail with your name against it, though there's no dedicated unlock log you can browse in the interface. The visible traces are the Vendor Submitted At column resetting and the RFX-sent receipt email you receive.

When bidder details freeze

Three different things freeze at three different moments. Worth keeping straight:

💡 Pro Tip: The practical order is therefore: get all the costs in first, then select the winner. Selecting early is the most common way people lock themselves out of fixing a number.

Selecting the winning bid

Two ways:

• On the Bidders tab, click the radio button in the Selected column.
• On the bidder page, use the Select switch in the header.

The selection confirmation.

Selecting a bid automatically un-selects any other bid on the same PR — there's only ever one winner.

⚠️ Heads up: From the Bidders tab radio you can only ever select. To un-select a winner you have to go to the bidder page and switch the Select toggle off. And you can only do that while the PR isn't yet Ready for Purchase.

ℹ️ Good to know: COMS doesn't ask you for a selection rationale at the moment you select. Record it in the bidder's Comments field — that's what its “Enter Reasons for Selection or Comments” placeholder is for — and do it before you select, while the field is still editable.

Once a winner is selected, the PR's stage moves to Bid Selected, the hero shows the selected vendor and amount, and (assuming approvals are done) Mark as Ready for Purchase becomes available. Back to Mark as Ready for Purchase.

Deleting a bidder

Delete in the row menu, with a confirmation. It's refused once the PR is locked — “This bid cannot be deleted because the purchase request is locked.” — and that guard binds everyone, super-admins included. Deleting a bid also removes its uploaded documents.