Calculate your tender writing savings

Why these numbers matter: the real cost of writing tenders by hand

Manual government tender writing is expensive in a way most Australian SMEs never total up. The calculator's default of 60 hours per response is a mid-range figure for a multi-section government tender: a simple council RFQ can come in well under that, while a complex, multi-schedule RFT with pricing workbooks and mandatory attachments can run far past 100 hours. At a fully loaded labour cost of $110 an hour, 60 hours is $6,600 of effort per tender before anyone has reviewed a single draft.

That cost also lands on the wrong people. Tender responses are rarely written by junior staff. They pull in directors, operations leads and senior practitioners, the same people who deliver billable work and run the business. Every hour a senior person spends rebuilding a compliance matrix in a spreadsheet or hunting through old proposals for a case study is an hour of delivery, sales or management the business loses. The timesheet records the hours; it never records what those hours displaced.

Then there is deadline week. Tenders arrive on the buyer's timetable, not yours, and a three-week response window lands on top of everything else the team was already doing. Rushed responses cut corners, and in government procurement corners are unforgiving: a response that misses a single mandatory requirement can be set aside without being scored, no matter how capable the business is.

The largest cost is the quietest one: the winnable tenders you never bid on because the team was at capacity. Freed-up hours turn directly into extra bids, which is why the calculator reports extra tender capacity alongside labour savings. For most SMEs that capacity, not the labour saving, is where the real return sits.

How AI reduces tender writing time: where the 85% comes from

The 85% figure is Doreva's end-to-end benchmark across the whole tender workflow, not the output of any single feature. It comes from four places where manual bid work burns time.

Requirements extraction

Reading a tender pack properly, pulling out the mandatory requirements, evaluation criteria, response schedules, attachments and due dates, normally takes the better part of a day before writing can even start. Doreva extracts all of it in minutes from the uploaded RFT, RFQ or ATM documents, so the team starts from a mapped set of requirements instead of a pile of PDFs.

Evidence reuse

Most bid time is spent finding and reshaping proof the business already has: case studies, staff profiles, licences, insurances, policies and certifications. Doreva keeps that evidence in a reusable library and matches it against each new tender's criteria, flagging gaps before drafting starts. Every completed response makes the next one faster.

Compliance matrix automation

Building a compliance matrix by hand means cross-checking every clause of the tender against every part of the response, usually in a spreadsheet, usually late in the process when errors are hardest to fix. Doreva generates the matrix automatically and tracks every clause through to submission, so nothing mandatory slips through.

Drafting and assembly

Doreva generates first drafts of each section from your own evidence and in your own tone, then assembles the response into a clean working document. Your team's job shifts from writing against a blank page to reviewing, tailoring the win themes and signing off. The hours that remain are the ones that actually win tenders: human judgement on strategy, pricing and proof.

Manual vs Doreva-assisted: a worked example

The table below uses the calculator's default settings: 4 tenders a month, 60 hours per response, a $110 hourly labour cost and 3 bid writers. Move the sliders above to see the same comparison on your own numbers.

All figures are calculated from the stated assumptions using the 85% time-reduction benchmark. The capacity row assumes every saved hour is reinvested into additional bids; most teams bank part of the saving as breathing room instead.