Negotiations

In some cases, after the tendering process, a stakeholder may wish to make a scope change to a contract before awarding it. Please continue reading if you would like to make any of the following changes:

• Add or remove line items from the unit price contract
• Add or remove provisional items
• Change pricing, descriptions, item names, or quantities
• Add or remove documents (although this can be accomplished more easily after the contract has been awarded)
• Split the contract into two or more smaller contracts and award these to multiple contractors.

Do not follow this guide if you are trying to do any of the following:

• Ask a bidder to fill in missing line items or correct mistakes (see correcting mistakes)
• Negotiation with a bidder strictly on price without changing contract scope (also see correcting mistakes)

Bottom line, this article covers scope changes.

Basic Negotiations

In a basic negotiation scenario, you have decided on a particular contractor (or you are pretty sure), but you want to make some changes to the scope or pricing of the contract. To do this, we must first open up a negotiation with this contractor. This is done on the overview page using the context menu under the desired bidder (see screenshot).

A negotiation is like a second contract, which can be manipulated in the contract editor in any way by the contractor and the stakeholder who opened the negotiation. However it will not appear in the "Contracts" page until negotiations have been concluded. You are free to have multiple ongoing negotiations open for the same contract.

Once both parties have accepted the outcome of the negotiation, the negotiated contract will move to the IN PROGRESS phase, and become a standalone contract and visible on the "Contracts" page. After negotiations have concluded and been accepted, what to do with the original tender is up to you. It can be left intact, deleted, or archived.

Advanced Negotiations: Awarding to Multiple Contractors

One advanced application of the negotiation feature is to split up the contract and award it to multiple contractors. This can be accomplished by opening up a separate negotiation with each of the desired contractors, then from each negotiation, remove the un-needed parts. For example, if you want to split a 3-part contract, do the following:

• Open a negotiation with company A, and delete parts 2 and 3 from the tender form
• Open a negotiation with company B, and delete parts 1 and 3 from the tender form
• Open a negotiation with company C, and delete parts 1 and 2 from the tender form