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.
Table of contents
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 administrators' and '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):
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Tips and tricks
Bidders will not be able to send questions until the tender has started.
Public questions
Questions will be private per default but can be set to public if needed. To set the visibility to 'public', check the box 'Public questions'. Public questions are visible to all bidders and observers in the tender.
Question deadline
A question deadline can be set to indicate a cut-off date for questions entitled to answers. Questions can still be sent after the deadline, but bidders should not expect these questions to be answered.
How to answer 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.
The first method is to make a general answer to all the bidders invited to the tender. To make a general answer to a question, go to Questions/Answers
New general answer. Then fill in a title and contents for the answer:
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Publishing 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. Then open the question by either double-clicking it or selecting it and clicking
Show
'Reply':
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This will open a window where you can reply directly. Fill in the answer and click 'Send':
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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: