Public Tenders — bid for French public contracts from Dolibarr

**Public Tenders** follows, inside Dolibarr, the whole journey of a company bidding for French public
contracts: from the tender you spot to the invoice filed on Chorus Pro. Nothing to retype elsewhere,
nothing to keep in a spreadsheet.

### The journey, step by step

**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.

### The technical statement, written once — and worth reading

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.

### The bundle: a single file to submit

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.

### A vault for company documents

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.

### A watch that works without you

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.

### Inside Dolibarr's own records

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.

### Built to be picked up

- 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.

### Open to other modules

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.

### Your data stays with you

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.

### Install and update

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.

### Limits, stated plainly

- 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.