Public Tenders — bid for French public contracts from Dolibarr

1. Spot

One record per tender: buyer, procedure, contract type, CPV codes, estimated amount, submission platform, link to the buyer profile, lots. The dates that matter — question deadline, site visit, bid submission — go into Dolibarr's agenda and come back on the dashboard.

2. Decide

A go / no-go grid scored on five criteria (trade, capacity, lead time, margin, distance), the decision with its reason, and a record of who decided what.

3. Prepare

The documents to provide are prefilled from a template and ticked off as you go. DC1, DC2 and the ESPD sheet are generated as PDFs from the candidate profile and the tender: buyer, subject, chosen lots, SIRET, turnover for three years, capacities, insurance, signatory. The DC4 declares a subcontractor, either with the bid or during performance. The price schedule (BPU) and the DQE are imported, totals are checked, and the offer can become a Dolibarr commercial proposal.

4. Submit

Date and time of submission, amount, acknowledgement of receipt stored with the file. Then the outcome: awarded, rejected, cancelled, with the rank and the reasons.

5. Perform

The contract you won has its own record: form (single contract, framework agreement with purchase orders or with subsequent contracts), duration, renewals and notice, minimum and maximum amounts. Purchase orders consume the ceiling, with an alert at the threshold you set. Amendments received from the buyer raise the ceiling and move the end date, without erasing the original amount. The certificates to resend every six months (French labour code, art. D8222-5) are computed and downloadable as a ZIP.

6. Invoice

The fields Chorus Pro requires — buyer SIRET, service code, commitment number — are carried onto the Dolibarr invoice and checked before sending. The module computes price revision from the CCAP formula (fixed part + up to six INSEE indices with their coefficients) and tracks late payments: due date, days late, interest at the ECB rate plus margin, and the flat recovery fee — computed on what remains due, payments already received deducted. A coefficient resting on a still provisional index value is flagged: it will change when the final one is published.

The technical statement is not a form: it is the document where you explain how you will perform the contract, and it often decides between two bids at the same price. The module does not write it for you; it does everything else, and it produces a document you can submit as it stands.

A paragraph library keeps your texts, written once, filed by theme — presentation, references, staff and equipment, method, schedule, quality, safety, environment, after-sales — with keywords and search. You write there in formatted text: bold, lists, sub-headings.

Your texts carry variables in braces ({acheteur}, {objet}, {lots}, {lieu}, {remise}, {siret}…) replaced when the document is produced: the same paragraph serves every tender. A variable with no value stays visible in braces, and the screen flags, section by section, the ones that would come out empty — a hole you can see beats a hole you cannot.

An image library keeps your pictures the same way: site photographs, team, equipment, diagrams, with a label and keywords, shown as thumbnails. One click places an image in the text, and it serves every later tender. A picture pasted straight into the editor is stored there automatically, instead of weighing down a single paragraph.

On a tender, the outline writes one section per theme in a single click; themes that already have a paragraph arrive filled in. Each section is edited in place, and moves up or down. A section is a copy: editing it does not touch the library, and enriching the library does not rewrite a statement already assembled — a submitted statement must not move. The Add to library button goes the other way when an edit is worth keeping.

Two outputs, both with a cover page (your logo taken from Dolibarr, the subject, the buyer, the references, the date, your contact details) and a table of contents:

▸ a PDF ready to submit, where the formatting is rendered and images are placed centred with their caption;

▸ a .docx to rework in a word processor, which actually embeds the images and carries the usual Word styles — the table of contents builds itself, and the whole layout can be changed at once.

Both keep their date, and a statement once produced is never overwritten by the next one. A preview shows the whole document on screen — cover page, contents, resolved sections, appendices — before producing any file.

You do not start from scratch for every tender. A similar contract almost always has its statement already: you reuse it whole — sections, edited texts, order, appendices — and only adjust what changes. Texts keep their variables, so the reused statement speaks of the new buyer and the new subject straight away.

References are described once on a sheet — client, subject, year, amount, place, duration, detail and picture — and placed in a text in the same shape every time. Buyers compare references between candidates: a constant format reads better than prose rewritten each time, and a form does not let the year or the amount slip.

Appendices attach vault documents to the statement — certificates, company registration, insurance, qualifications. The PDF includes them page by page, each behind its own divider page. The file is not copied when chosen: a certificate renewed between two submissions goes out in its current version. If a document is protected or in a format the module cannot include, its divider page stays with a note that it must be submitted separately — you see it before submitting, not after.

A complete response quickly comes to five or six files: the DC1, the DC2, the ESPD fact sheet, one DC4 per subcontractor, the technical statement and its appendices. The module assembles them in the order the tender rules set, into a single PDF: cover page, contents, then each document behind a “Document no. *n*” page that names it.

Two templates save the first click — application (the forms, then the vault certificates) and bid (the statement and its appendices) — and the order is then changed line by line. One filing sometimes calls for one bundle per envelope: nothing prevents preparing several.

The bundle copies nothing: each line points at a document that lives elsewhere. Regenerate a DC1 after a correction, renew a certificate in the vault, and the bundle produced afterwards carries the version of the day. That is what makes it useful up to the last hour before the deadline.

A document the module cannot embed — a password-protected PDF, one truncated by an interrupted download — keeps its separator page with the note that it must be submitted separately, and the screen says so after production. A bundle missing a document without saying so is only noticed after filing.

URSSAF clearance certificate, tax certificate, company registration, INSEE record, insurance certificates, qualifications: each document is encrypted (AES-256-GCM) in Dolibarr's documents directory, with its end of validity. The module warns before expiry, keeps the renewal history, and opens the vault only to the people holding that specific permission.

Saved searches, run on their own at the frequency you choose, on BOAMP (French open data), TED (Official Journal of the European Union), an RSS or Atom feed from a platform, or a web page to monitor. Only new notices are emailed, to the recipients you name. The module honours each site's robots.txt, refuses addresses that are not https, never reads a page that asks for a login, and stores no password.

A Public tenders tab is added to the third party, commercial proposal, order, invoice and project records: the tenders and contracts of that buyer, the tender a proposal is the offer for, the purchase order an order came from, and the Chorus Pro check and payment delay of an invoice.

▸ Accordion menu, dashboard, guided tour.

▸ Built-in help in French and English, screen by screen, from the ? button or the F1 key.

▸ Server diagnostic that checks what the module needs and says what to do.

▸ Adjustable appearance (accent colour, density) and a one-click return to the original look.

▸ Audit log of what was done, exportable as CSV.

▸ Settings backup: one file to take away and load back on another instance.

▸ Statement content backup: an archive that carries your paragraphs, images and reference sheets — the asset that matters — and loads them elsewhere without creating duplicates.

▸ Eight permissions to hand out to groups, including a separate one for the vault.

▸ Eleven editable value lists: no business label is frozen in the code.

The module does not keep to itself. Another module — yours, or another INTECH one — can read a contract and its financial terms through a documented, fixed facade: the advance, the retention money, the payment period, the price revision formula, the Chorus Pro data, the consumption of the ceiling. Enough to produce a progress invoice without asking anyone again for what has already been entered.

What is published does not move: a release check refuses any version that would stop returning a promised value. The Settings › Server diagnostic screen says, module by module, which one goes through the bridge and when it last read — the question “does it talk to each other?” is settled at a glance. Six Dolibarr triggers signal a contract's life, and a hook lets a neighbouring module display its own block on the record. No dependency in either direction: each module installs and sells on its own. The contract fits in docs/PONT.md, shipped with the archive.

Everything is in your Dolibarr. The module leaves your server on two functions only, both off by default: the BOAMP import and the scheduled watch, which send your search criteria to the service being queried and your results to the addresses you give. No data is sent to the publisher. Files are stored in Dolibarr's documents directory, out of direct reach from the web.

Deploy the archive from Home › Setup › Modules, enable the module, hand out the permissions, open the diagnostic. An update is done by replacing the folder: missing tables are created on first opening, without re-enabling, and data is kept. Disabling keeps tables and files.

▸ The module does not submit your bid for you on a platform: buyer profiles require an account and a signature, and there is no public interface for that.

▸ It does not write your technical statement for you: it files your texts, images and references, assembles them, lays them out and produces the document. The content stays yours.

▸ Only vault documents in PDF format can be appended, and a .docx cannot embed the pages of a PDF: if you file the .docx, submit the appendices separately. The screen reminds you and counts them.

▸ It does not produce an official ESPD: it gives a sheet to copy into the ESPD utility of Chorus Pro or of the buyer profile.

▸ The form PDFs are always in French, whatever the language of the screen: they are French administration forms.

▸ Public procurement law changes. The texts offered (sworn statement, thresholds, rates, deadlines) are editable in the settings and flagged as to be checked; nothing is frozen in the code.