How to start bidding for public contracts in Spain: a guide for SMEs new to the public sector

What a public tender is

A tender is the procedure through which a public administration or public body buys works, services or supplies from companies and professionals, on terms and against criteria fixed in advance. The administration publishes what it needs, companies submit offers, and the contracting body picks the best of them according to the criteria it announced. It is public purchasing with the rules written down, and those rules are both what puts people off and what puts every bidder on an equal footing.

For an SME that has a practical consequence: the contract does not go to whoever sells best, but to whoever best answers what has been asked. A public contract can become an additional, recurring line of business, but it demands discipline, paperwork and a genuine ability to deliver what you have committed to.

What the specifications are, and why you have to read them in full

The specifications are the documents that govern each tender. They set out what is being bought, who may bid, what documentation has to be supplied, what technical requirements apply, how the offers will be assessed and what terms the contract will carry. There are usually two: the administrative specifications (PCAP), which hold the administrative and financial rules, and the technical specifications (PPT), which describe the work itself. We cover both in detail in what the specifications are: PCAP and PPT.

Inside the specifications it pays to separate three things that are easily confused: the minimum requirements, which you have to meet or evidence before you can compete at all; the award criteria, which earn points; and the conditions that simply describe how the contract will be run. Mixing up the first two is the most common reason offers are excluded, and the most common reason offers go in with no chance of winning.

What you will be asked for: solvency, documentation and experience

The word you will meet most often at the start is solvency: the economic, financial, technical or professional capacity a company has to evidence before it can take part in certain contracts. What exactly is required depends on the tender, and in many procedures it is evidenced at the outset with a declaration, the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD, known in Spain as the DEUC), with the supporting documents following later.

• Company details, powers of attorney and the authority of whoever signs.
• Evidence of economic and technical solvency, in whatever form the specifications call for.
• References and a track record, where the contract requires one.
• Certifications or classifications, if the tender calls for them.
• A commitment to assign resources and, where relevant, the joint venture (UTE) or subcontracting documents.

If one of these is missing, all is not lost. It depends on whether it is a mandatory requirement, whether it can be obtained before the date it is needed, and on the terms of the tender. And if the contract is too large for your company on its own, bidding alongside another company through a temporary joint venture (UTE) is a well-trodden route. There is more in solvency, the ESPD and joint ventures.

Can we bid if we have never worked with the public sector?

In many cases, yes. Having no track record in public procurement does not mean a company cannot start: what counts is the experience you can evidence in your own line of work, and the specific solvency and experience requirements of each contract. Nor, as a rule, do you need to be entered in a register before you can bid; some registers and classifications simplify the paperwork or are required in particular cases, and in others they are not compulsory at all.

Where to start, in practice

1. Define what you sell and to whom. Which services or products, in which areas, for what kind of body, and at what contract size it makes sense.
2. Gather the basic documentation once: company details, powers of attorney, references, certifications and the figures usually asked for as evidence of solvency.
3. Look at what is being published in your sector before you bid for anything. Where tenders are published, and why watching them by hand does not scale, is covered in this guide.
4. Choose your first one carefully. A contract that matches what you already know how to deliver, with requirements you meet and a deadline you can live with.
5. Read the whole specification and separate what is mandatory from what scores before you write a line.

How long it takes to prepare a bid

It varies enormously from one tender to the next. Some procedures are fairly straightforward; others call for long proposals, annexes, certificates, financial calculations and several people working in step. For a company just starting out, the first bid usually costs far more than the fifth will: a large part of the work, the documentation, the method and the knack of reading a specification, is done once and reused.

What a tender department can do for you, even if you do not have one

Everything above is the job of a tender department: monitoring, discarding, reading, preparing and submitting. Companies starting out rarely have anyone whose job that is, and that is where Carabela comes in. It acts as that department: it helps you see which opportunities exist for your line of work, which requirements tend to be asked for and what documentation you need, it stops you sinking time into tenders you are not ready for, and it prepares your first bids in a structured way. How it does this is set out in tender department.