What this is for
The selection questionnaire, often shortened to SQ, is the standard set of questions a public buyer asks to check a supplier is suitable before looking at the actual bid. It covers things like your finances, your insurance, your relevant experience and whether you have been excluded from public contracts. The questions are much the same from one tender to the next, so Velstrian Bid lets you answer them once for your organisation and reuse them. Private buyers rarely use a standard selection questionnaire, so the tab is shown to organisations that bid for public work. If you bid only for private work you will not see it.
Answered once, prefilled everywhere
Your answers here are your organisation's standing set. They are not tied to any single bid. When you start a bid that includes a suitability stage, these answers are prefilled into it automatically. Editing a bid never changes your standing set, so one bid can never quietly rewrite the answers another bid relies on. For that reason the screen sits under the Library area, beside the Answer library, not inside a contract.
Step by step
- Open the Answer library from the Velstrian Bid menu, then its Reusable selection questionnaire tab.
- Work down the questions and fill in your organisation's answers.
- Where a suggestion appears inside a question, it is drawn from the government Central Digital Platform, the single place suppliers keep their core company details. The suggestion shows its source and has its own accept control, so you choose whether to use it.
- Save your answers. They are now ready to prefill your next bid.
Who can edit it
Everyone can read the standing answers. Saving changes is limited to team members who can edit data, so a viewer sees the set without being able to alter it. Because this is organisation wide content, clearing an answer here is not the same as clearing one on a single bid, and the screen says so.
What happens next
Inside a bid with a suitability stage, review the prefilled answers against that specific tender. Some buyers word a question slightly differently or ask for a figure as at a given date, so always check the prefilled text still fits before you submit.
Common problems
A Central Digital Platform suggestion looks wrong: it reflects what is held about your company there, so correct it at source if it is out of date, and accept only what is right. Answers not appearing in a bid: prefill happens for bids that include a suitability stage, so a tender without one will not pull them in.