A tender submission is a printing deadline with legal teeth
Most print deadlines are uncomfortable if missed. A tender deadline is different: submissions close at a stated time and a late document is usually not accepted at all, however good it is. That changes how the printing should be planned, because the risk is not a delayed delivery but a wasted bid.
The other difference is that the requirements are written down. Government and large corporate tenders specify the format, sometimes down to the paper size, the number of copies and how the document must be bound. Those instructions are part of the evaluation, and a submission that ignores them can be marked down before anyone reads the content.
Read the submission requirements before you design anything
The tender documents will usually state some or all of the following. Pull them out into a checklist at the start rather than the night before.
- Page size and orientation, and whether printing is single or double sided
- Maximum page count, and whether appendices, dividers and covers count toward it
- Minimum font size, which is more common than people expect
- Number of hard copies, including how many must be originals with wet signatures
- Binding method, and whether loose-leaf or ring binders are required or forbidden
- Whether sections must be separated by tabbed dividers, and how they should be labelled
- Sealed envelope requirements, including what must be written on the outside
- A soft copy on physical media, and whether it must be identical to the printed set
Where a requirement is ambiguous, the clarification window exists for exactly this. Asking whether the cover counts in the page limit is a normal question and a great deal cheaper than reprinting eight copies.
Binding that suits a document being read by a panel
Evaluation panels handle these documents hard. They flip between sections, lay them flat next to another bid, and annotate them. The binding decides whether that is easy.
Wire or comb binding opens completely flat and lets a page fold back on itself. It is the most practical choice for a working document, and it is what most panels are used to. Wire looks tidier than plastic comb; comb allows pages to be swapped, which matters if a late correction is likely.
Perfect binding gives a clean square spine that can be printed on, and it looks the most finished. It does not open flat, and on a thick document the inner margin swallows text if the layout has not allowed for it. Suitable for a proposal meant to be read straight through, less so for one meant to be cross-referenced.
Ring binders are specified when the client expects to add documents later, or when sections are issued separately. Bulky, but sometimes mandatory.
Thermal or tape binding is quick and cheap, fine for internal copies, and it looks it. Save it for the file copy rather than the submission.
Whatever the method, increase the inner margin. A 20mm gutter on a bound document reads comfortably; the 15mm that looked fine on screen does not once a spine takes several millimetres of it.
The details that cost bids
Content aside, submissions get marked down for physical problems that a print check would have caught.
Colour that fails in monochrome. Panels photocopy documents. A chart distinguishing three lines by colour alone becomes unreadable in grey, so use different line styles as well. Print one section in black and white and look at it before you commit.
Screenshots pasted at screen resolution. Technical appendices are full of these, and at print size they are soft and sometimes illegible. Retake them at a larger size, or rebuild the important ones as vector diagrams.
Page numbering that does not survive the appendices. Continuous numbering across the whole submission, including dividers, makes it possible for a panel to refer to a page in a meeting. Section-restarted numbering does not.
Signature pages printed double sided. If a page needs a wet signature and a stamp, give it its own sheet. Someone will need to sign multiple copies and the process is easier when the pages are separable.
Working back from the closing time
Build the schedule from the submission deadline backwards, and put the padding where it protects you.
- Deadline day: deliver or hand-carry. Do not plan to print on this day
- One day before: collect and check the finished sets, sign originals, seal envelopes
- Two days before: printing and binding, with a checked proof already approved
- Three days before: final PDF supplied and a proof set produced for reading
- A week before: confirm quantities and binding with the printer, so materials are in stock
The proof set is the step most often skipped and the one that catches the most. Read the printed proof rather than the file. Page breaks that fall badly, a table split across two pages, a diagram that lost its labels in the export - these are visible on paper in ten minutes and invisible on screen for weeks.
The soft copy that travels with the box
Most submissions want an electronic copy alongside the printed sets, and the requirement usually says it must match the hard copy exactly. That sounds trivial and is where a surprising number of submissions trip.
Produce the PDF first and print from it. If the printed set comes from the document file and the soft copy is exported separately, a font substitution or a reflowed table can make the two differ by a page, and a panel that notices will ask why. One source file, one export, both outputs from that export.
Check what the media has to be. Some tenders still specify a USB drive, some want a disc, some want an upload with a receipt printed and included in the box. Where a drive is required, use a new one rather than something from a drawer, label it physically with the tender reference and the company name, and check it opens on a machine that is not yours. A drive containing an unrelated folder from a previous job is an avoidable embarrassment.
Watch the file size limits on upload portals, since a scanned appendix can push a submission past them. Optimising images down is fine; flattening the whole document into a low resolution image is not, because the panel then cannot search the text.
Finally, keep signatures consistent. If the printed original is signed in ink, the soft copy should show that same signed page scanned, not an unsigned version.
Ordering tender printing
Tell us the closing date and time at the first conversation rather than the delivery date you would like. We schedule these against the deadline and hold capacity for a same-day reprint of a section, because the common emergency is not the whole document failing but one page changing at the last hour.
Useful things to send with the file: the number of complete sets and how many are originals, the binding required by the tender wording rather than by preference, the divider tab labels as a list, and any requirement about the outer envelope. If the tender specifies a cover format, send that page of the tender document itself so we can check the finished item against it.
We keep the approved file for the duration of the process, so a request for extra copies during clarification is a reprint rather than a rebuild. For the wider document work that sits around a bid, document and colour printing covers the everyday side, and setting up print for a new Singapore business is useful if this is your first submission as a new company.
Send us the requirements page along with your draft and we will confirm the format is compliant before anything is printed.
