It offers, and it does not paste
A PQQ answer reused unchanged in the ITT is boilerplate, and boilerplate is what a buyer marks down. So the platform finds the earlier answer, checks what has gone stale in it, and stops there.
A prequalification asks you to describe your health and safety management arrangements. Eight weeks later the ITT for the same job asks you to set out your health and safety management system. It is the same answer, somebody already approved it, and writing it again costs a draft, a review, and a second version of the company’s position that may not match the first. A buyer who reads both documents is entitled to notice.
So Bid-On finds the earlier approved answers and offers them against the new question. What it will not do is put one into the bid.
That restraint is the feature. An answer pasted unchanged into the next submission is boilerplate, and boilerplate is exactly what an evaluator marks down — the reuse that actually works is somebody reading a good answer and writing this buyer’s version of it. The absence is checked against the source: there is no apply, no paste, no insert, no fill, the file writes nothing to the record and emits no event. An absence cannot be exercised by calling it, so it is verified the only way an absence can be.
Reuse therefore goes through the ordinary command that records any answer — the same citation check against this customer’s current evidence, the same versioning, the same review state. What is added is the lineage, verified rather than labelled: it has to be an approved answer, on another bid, of the same customer. A reviewer can then see that an answer came from the prequalification rather than from nowhere, which is the first question anybody asks about a reused one.
And it checks three things that reading an old pack by hand would miss.
The citations, against this bid’s date. An answer approved in March citing an insurance certificate that lapsed in April is not reusable against a June return, and nothing about reading the prose would tell you. Each candidate reports which of its citations are current, lapsed or withdrawn.
The length, against this question’s limit. A five-hundred-word PQQ answer offered against a three-hundred-word ITT question is still worth reading as a starting point; saying so is the difference between a useful offer and a trap. Where the question states no limit the answer is “unknown” rather than “fine”, because those are not the same thing.
And the lineage. An answer from the prequalification this bid actually follows is a different proposition from one out of an unrelated bid two years ago, even where the wording matches better — so those are offered first and marked. The matching floor is deliberately higher than the one retrieval uses: a loosely matched passage is material a drafter may or may not use, but a loosely matched prior answer is a finished, approved, confident-sounding answer to a different question, and the reader’s instinct is to use what is offered. Offering none is better.
See the record being made rather than described.
Launch the demo environment