Quote Leveling & Bid Comparison Builder: Stop Awarding the Wrong Supplier
Pull every supplier quote onto common line items and a true total-cost basis — unit price, freight, tooling, payment-term value, and lead time — rank them on an apples-to-apples grid, and let a sourcing manager approve the award before it's recorded.
A logged-in tool where you load each supplier's quote, map it to common line items, compute the true landed/total cost per supplier (unit price + freight + tooling + payment-term value + lead time), rank them on a clear comparison grid, have a sourcing manager review and approve the award (with a reason if it isn't the lowest sticker price), record the award, notify suppliers, and export the comparison and award as CSV.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- A few real supplier quotes for one RFQ (line prices, freight, tooling, MOQ, lead time, payment terms)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
A buyer asks three suppliers for a quote, lines up the bottom-line numbers in a spreadsheet, and awards the cheapest one. Six weeks later the "cheap" supplier's freight charge, the tooling fee buried in a footnote, the 60-day lead time that idles a line, and the Net-15 terms that cost real money have quietly turned the lowest sticker price into the most expensive decision in the quarter.
Leveling bids by hand is brutal. Every supplier quotes differently — different line groupings, different units, different currencies, some bundling freight and some not, some hiding tooling and setup, some with monster minimum order quantities. Putting them on a fair, common basis is exactly the kind of fiddly, error-prone work a spreadsheet does badly: one mismatched cell and you award the wrong company. And when finance or your manager asks "why this supplier and not the cheaper one?", the reasoning lives in the buyer's head, not in a record anyone can audit.
This tool replaces that spreadsheet with a real, governed application that levels every quote to the same yardstick — and makes the award a deliberate, approved, documented decision instead of a guess.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for your sourcing team. You create an RFQ, then load each supplier's quote — line prices, freight, tooling/setup, MOQ, lead time, payment terms, and quote validity — either typed in or imported from a CSV (or pulled from your RFQ tool later).
The tool maps every supplier's lines to a common set of line items, converts currencies and units to one basis, and computes a true total cost of ownership per supplier: extended unit price plus freight, plus amortized tooling/setup, plus the value of the payment terms (early-pay discount or the cost of carrying Net-30/60), with lead time scored consistently so a faster supplier gets credit. It ranks everyone on a clean comparison grid, flags incomplete quotes, and recommends an award. Then a sourcing manager reviews the leveled comparison and the recommendation and approves the winner — recording a reason if the choice isn't the lowest total cost. Only after approval is the award recorded, the suppliers notified, and the comparison exported.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you run RFQs today, which systems and spreadsheets you use, how your suppliers actually quote (units, currencies, what they bundle), how you value payment terms and lead time, your typical and peak number of bidders and line items, and the messy edge cases that have burned you before. It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the tool levels quotes the way your category and rules require — not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the data model, loading and mapping quotes to common line items, the currency/unit normalization, the total-cost engine (freight + tooling amortization + payment-term value + lead-time scoring), the comparison grid and incomplete-quote flags, the manager approval gate, the award record and supplier notifications, and the CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that imports quotes from a Google Sheet / CSV and exports the comparison and award as clean CSVs — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend, no integration required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
Awarding business is exactly the kind of decision that needs controls. The plan builds in login so only your sourcing team can use the tool, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's RFQs and quotes, a complete audit trail of who loaded which quote, who changed an assumption, and who approved which award, a hard human-approval gate so no award is recorded until a sourcing manager signs off on the leveled comparison (with a documented reason when the winner isn't the lowest total cost), and duplicate guards so the same supplier's quote can't be loaded twice and an RFQ can't be awarded twice.
Who it's for
Buyers, category managers, and sourcing/procurement teams who level bids by hand and are tired of squinting at three differently-shaped quotes hoping they didn't miss a hidden cost. If you can describe how your suppliers quote and how you weigh price against freight, tooling, terms, and lead time, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have your first leveled bid comparison on screen before the weekend's out.