RFQ Builder & Bid Collection Portal

The problem this kills

You email an RFQ spreadsheet to five suppliers. Five replies come back: one in the body of an email, one as a PDF, one with the line items in a different order, one missing the lead time, one quoting a bundle you can't unbundle. Now you're hand-copying numbers into a comparison sheet, chasing the supplier who ignored the deadline, and praying you didn't transpose a price.

The mess isn't your fault - it's that nobody made the suppliers answer in the same shape. This tool does exactly that. You define the line items, specs, quantities, required terms, and deadline once. Each supplier gets their own private link to a form built from your RFQ. Their bids come back normalized, sealed from each other, and locked when the clock runs out.

What you'll build

A small, private web app for you and your sourcing team:

• Draft an RFQ - line items with specs and quantities, the terms you require (payment, delivery, validity), and a hard bid deadline.
• Approve before it goes out - nothing reaches a supplier until you sign off on the RFQ.
• Invite by unique link - each supplier gets a private, tokenized link to a bid form generated from your RFQ. No supplier ever sees another's link or bid.
• Collect structured bids - suppliers fill in per-line pricing, lead times, alternates, and answer your required-terms questions. Every bid arrives in the same columns.
• Enforce the deadline - submissions lock automatically after the cutoff.
• Log Q&A - clarifications and questions are recorded against the RFQ so the conversation isn't scattered across inboxes.
• Review, approve, export - you see a normalized bid table, approve the final bid set, hand it to comparison/award, and export everything as CSV.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your current RFQ process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, how you name line items and SKUs, your typical and peak number of suppliers and line items, your required terms, and your messy edge cases (split awards, partial bids, no-quotes, alternates). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before building anything. The result is a tool shaped to how you source, not a generic template.

After the interview, the plan walks you step by step - each step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt - through the database, login, the RFQ builder, the approval gate, the supplier link + bid form, the deadline lock, the Q&A log, the normalized bid table, and the CSV export. It includes a "No API yet?" fallback so you can run the whole thing on the built-in form and a CSV import/export with zero integration to your existing system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can draft and review RFQs.
• Row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's RFQs and bids - and suppliers only ever see their own bid through their own link.
• A full audit trail - who drafted, approved, sent, and exported, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate twice: the buyer must approve the RFQ before it's sent, and approve the final bid set before it moves to comparison/award.
• Duplicate guards - one bid of record per supplier per RFQ (keyed on RFQ id + supplier id), with revision history so re-submissions don't create duplicates.
• Sealed bids - suppliers can never see each other's submissions, and the deadline lock means no late edits slip through.

Who it's for

Buyers and sourcing specialists who send an RFQ to a handful of suppliers and get back a pile of differently formatted replies. If your "comparison step" today is really a "re-typing step," this is for you. No developer required - you'll build it by pasting prompts into an AI coding agent.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.