loss 03 of 4
Binned before anyone read it.
A notice priced above your grade ceiling is not an ambitious bid. It is a submission that is thrown out before anyone reads a page of it — and you will have paid for every one of those pages first.
This is the only one of the four that costs you real money on the way out rather than in silence. You saw the tender. You wanted it. You priced it, wrote the method statement, chased the documents, lodged the security — and the ceiling on your certificate made all of it non-responsive before the envelope was opened on merit.
A single reading of one number on the notice, against one letter on your certificate, would have stopped it. Nobody does that reading reliably at eleven at night on the fortieth tender of the week. A machine does it on every notice, every time, for three thebe.
The rule behind it
Works registrations carry a grade — A through E, plus OC — and the grade caps the contract value a contractor may bid for. The cap is a legal boundary on the registration, not a guideline about capacity, and a notice with a stated value above your ceiling is not a stretch. It is out.
Services, Supplies and Consultants registrations are not graded this way, so this test only applies where the notice sits under a graded Works code. We do not apply a ceiling that does not exist — that would quietly hide work you are entitled to bid for, which is the same loss as an aggregator's noise, arriving by a politer route.
When the value is not stated
Plenty of notices do not publish a value. Where none is stated the test cannot run, and we say so on the alert rather than guessing at one. An estimated ceiling breach is not a reason to withhold a tender from you — it is a reason to tell you what is unknown and let you decide.
The cost of finding this out late is the clearest argument on the site: the three ledgers.
one number, checked every time