Build your business case.

It puts a figure on what your bid operation costs today in contributor time and money, and what that looks like against the response time reduction and win rate we would expect you to reach. Six figures are yours and three are ours, and the three are stated on the page rather than hidden in the arithmetic. The value in the first half is having the cost in one place: bid team hours, subject matter expert time, security and legal review and pricing input usually sit in different budgets, and a business case needs them as a single line.

Two, and both are stated at the foot of the results panel: the reduction in response time we would expect, and the win rate we would expect you to reach from wherever you are now. They are averages taken from customer outcomes rather than a guarantee, so your own result will sit in a range around them that depends on your industry, your document mix and the nature of your responses. The conservative and optimistic cases scale both down and up, and that range is stated beside them. Everything else in the calculation is a number you entered.

Because we subtract the cost before dividing, which is the standard definition of return on investment, where some calculators in this category divide the benefit by the spend without subtracting it and produce a larger multiple. On identical inputs ours will read exactly one times lower than theirs (9x where theirs would show 10x, for example), and that is the difference between the two formulas rather than a difference in the outcome.

Return and payback are calculated against our published annual cost for a team of the size these inputs describe, and that figure is stated at the foot of the results panel rather than hidden inside the arithmetic. We do not ask you to guess a budget before we have told you a price, and we do not quietly divide by a number you cannot see. If your own budget is different, the workings further down the page give you the formula so you can substitute it.

It divides our annual cost by one twelfth of the net annual benefit, so it answers how many months of benefit it takes to cover a year of cost. Net annual benefit is the value of the hours released plus the revenue from a higher win rate, both shown in the results table. Where the answer is less than a month the page says so rather than printing a fraction.

Licences and subscriptions you already pay for to run this work, whatever they are. It is optional and it only affects what your process costs today, though it is worth counting the whole stack rather than the response tool alone: storage, e-signature and whatever sits under security for questionnaire handling all belong to the same operation. A case that leaves them out understates the size of the decision.

The figures a finance reviewer will ask for next. It adds your return on investment, the same case at conservative and optimistic benchmarks beside the expected one, and a three-year total. It unlocks on this page as soon as you complete the short form, and you can book a complimentary review of it before it goes to finance.

No. The calculator is open: move any input and the expected case updates straight away, including hours released, their value, added revenue, net return and payback, without telling us anything. A short form unlocks your return on investment, the conservative and optimistic cases and the three-year total on the same page, with no commitment attached.