First-time Ontario municipal tender bidder checklist

Most first bids don't lose on price. They get rejected on a missed registration, a missed meeting, or a form nobody checked. This is the checklist we work from — the same one our Starter Kit turns into fill-in worksheets.

1. Registrations — before you even look at a tender

• Business Number and your legal company name exactly as it will appear on every form.
• Accounts on the portals your target municipalities use: Ontario Tenders Portal, Biddingo, bids&tenders — and CanadaBuys for federal work.
• WSIB account in good standing, with a clearance certificate you can pull on demand.
• Commercial general liability insurance at the limits tenders in your range typically require — and an insurer who can issue a certificate naming a buyer as additional insured within a day or two, not a week.
• If you plan to bid work that requires bonds, a bonding facility arranged before a tender forces the question.

2. Know your buy-box

• The contract size you can actually cash-flow between payment cycles.
• The geography you can service without travel eating the margin.
• Your hard limits: the highest insurance limit you carry, whether you can bond, and the work classes you will not touch.
• Any conflict that disqualifies you — affiliation with the buyer, the designer, or a competing bidder.

3. Screen every tender in about ten minutes

• Closing date and time — and whose clock (most Ontario portals close at 2:00 p.m. local, but read the tender, not the habit).
• Mandatory site meeting? If it already happened, stop — that tender is gone.
• Bonding, insurance, and security requirements versus your buy-box.
• Scope fit: could you actually perform or subcontract this, at this size, in this location?
• Evaluation method: lowest compliant price, or scored? It changes how you write the bid.

4. The paperwork that gets bids thrown out

• Every addendum acknowledged — check for new ones the day before closing, not the day you downloaded the tender.
• Every form signed, dated, and in the format asked for; bid deposit or bond enclosed if required.
• Prices in the exact structure requested (unit prices, lump sum, taxes shown the way the form wants them).
• Submission through the right channel — portal upload completed before the deadline, not started at it.

5. Calendar discipline

• Three dates per tender, tracked separately: question deadline, mandatory meeting, closing.
• A standing weekly scan of your portals so tenders are found with weeks to work, not days.
• After closing: the standstill and debrief window, and the roster or standing-offer lists worth applying to next.

Questions about the checklist or the kit: email cory@authenticintegrity.ca. Every email gets read.