Making quotes comparable
Free Micro-Tender: bring transport quotes onto one comparable price — toll, diesel surcharge, waiting time and payment terms included. With a ready-made request text so everyone answers the same question.
The two belong together: a logistics provider awards work to its subcontractors and at the same time fills in the producer's tender. Hence two tabs and not two tools – the calculation is the same in both.
You are collecting quotes and want to know which one is genuinely the cheapest. The calculator puts them all on the same basis and writes you the enquiry that makes this possible in the first place.
You are answering a customer's tender. The same calculator shows you where your quote lands in their comparison — and why a lower headline price can lose an award.
| Provider | Headline price | Toll | Diesel | Waiting time | Payment terms | Comparable price |
|---|
Qualification – before any price
This stage earns no points. It opens the door or it closes it – whoever scores it lets a cheap provider collect points for something that should have excluded them.
Price enquiry – the same five questions to everyone
Word for word to everyone. Anyone who demands extra details from individual providers has lost the comparison before the first quote arrives.
Answer all five points explicitly. An open question is assumed against you in the comparison – not out of malice, but because the buyer would otherwise have to guess.
Why the lowest headline price is rarely the lowest price
Quotes do not become comparable by calculation, but by the same question. Whoever normalises afterwards is guessing; whoever asks beforehand knows. That is why the request text sits next to the calculator and not behind it.
Four items decide an award more often than the price itself:
- Toll: included or not — the most common silent difference between two quotes.
- Diesel surcharge: a percentage on the base price that only becomes visible on the invoice.
- Free waiting time: thirty minutes granted and two hours granted are not the same product.
- Payment terms: being allowed to pay twice as late is real money — the tool converts it using your interest rate.
Below three quotes the calculator names no winner. Two quotes are not a market, they are an opinion.
Why the enquiry has two stages
Qualify first, look at prices afterwards. Whoever puts both into one questionnaire sees the price before knowing whether the provider is even allowed to perform the service – and a low price changes the assessment afterwards, even if nobody would admit it.
Qualification is therefore not scored. It is a threshold: whoever clears it enters the price enquiry; whoever does not, does not get in. Turning it into a weighted criterion would mean letting a ground for exclusion be offset against a good price.
Two tabs, because these are two tasks – not two roles
Whoever awards transports is almost always also someone who is put out to tender. A logistics provider awards work to its subcontractors and at the same time fills in the producer's tender. Asking for the role would demand a decision that does not exist in logistics.
The tabs therefore do not ask who you are, but what you are doing right now. The calculation is the same in both – two separate tools would arrive at two figures, and that is exactly where every dispute about an award begins.
In the "Answer a tender" tab the calculator does not show who wins, but what you are losing on: the largest single item between your quote and the leading one. A shortfall of forty euros says nothing – that forty euros of it is the toll says what has to be different in the next quote.
Criteria, weights and the metrics that show whether an award worked are set out in full on the dedicated page about the procedure.
Tendering in logistics
The calculator runs entirely in the browser. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored.
One award becomes a procedure
- Request to several providers at once, with a deadline and a reminder
- Quotes arrive structured instead of as a mail attachment
- Comparison against your own history on the same lane
- Award, order and invoicing without re-entering anything
- Analysis: where quotes regularly drift apart
The free calculator stays free; the additional functions belong to the operational portal.
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