When an agency issues an amendment, contractors must download the amendment and apply it to their bid submission. This article explains how to download amendments for a proposal that already contains bid information.
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The AASHTOWare Project Bids™ Bid component won't let you submit your bid unless you have loaded all proposal amendments into your bid. If you're missing amendments, you'll get an error message telling you how many amendments are missing.
To make sure you have the correct number of amendments before submitting your bid, you can compare the number of amendments shown on the proposal within Bidx.com to the number of amendments shown on your bid within Project Bids.
The total count of amendments loaded into your bid is displayed in two places:
- In the header of the Project Bids Bid component
- In the Amendments field of the General tab
You can download bid files and amendments in two formats:
- ZIP file | Downloading as a ZIP file will automatically overwrite your existing .ebsx file and delete your previous work
- Individual files | Download individual bid and amendment files as they are issued to prevent overwriting your existing work
To download the ZIP file, navigate to the proposal on Bidx.com and select Download all files. To download individual amendment files, navigate to the proposal on Bidx.com and select the amendment file(s) individually.
Project Bids amendment files are noted by the proposal name plus the amendment number. So for example, if the proposal ExampleProp has two amendments, the amendment files will be named ExampleProp.001x and ExampleProp.002x.
Best Practice | ZIP files vs. individual download
- We recommend downloading the ZIP file only when you first begin work on your bid. As amendments are issued, you can then download the individual amendment file and keep your existing work in the .ebsx file.
- When downloading individual files, make sure you save the new file to the same location as your existing bid files. If you're not prompted to save the file to a specific location, your browser most likely sent the file to your Downloads folder automatically.
Warning | Downloading amendment files
- Save amendment files locally to your computer, such as your desktop or documents folder. Do not save files to a shared or network drive (such as a company or cloud server). Files saved anywhere other than your computer may not load correctly when you open your bid.
- Save amendment files in the same location as the proposal's .ebsx file or they will not automatically load when you open your bid.
Download and apply an amendment
- From Bidx.com, navigate to the appropriate proposal page.
- Click the Amendment file link.
- The file name ends with a number that reflects the number of amendments applied to the proposal followed by the letter X.
- Download the file and save it in the same location as the proposal's .ebsx file.
- From your computer, open the Bid Component.
- Find and open the appropriate proposal.
- Because both the amendment and .ebsx files are saved in the same location, the Bid Component automatically attaches the amendment to your proposal.
- The Amendment Changes window will open and display the changes made to your proposal.
- If you don't see the Amendment Changes window, you need to manually load the amendment by following the steps below.
- Print the changes for your records and click Close.
If you did not print the amendment changes, you can review them at any time by expanding the Tools menu and selecting View Amendment Summary.
Warning | Manually load amendments
If you don't see the Amendment Changes window after downloading the amendment file and opening the proposal in the Bid Component, the file was most likely saved to a different location than your .ebsx file.
In this case you must manually load the amendments by following these steps:
- From the Bid Component, open your proposal.
- Open the File menu and select Load Amendment. A file browser window will appear.
- Find and select the amendment (to help you locate the correct file, the amendment's filename will be pre-populated in your file browser). Click Open. The Amendment Changes window will appear.
- Note: When manually loading amendments, you have to upload them into your bid one at a time and in numerical order, starting with Amendment 001x.
- Verify that the amendment was successfully applied to your bid.
- Print the changes for your records and click Close to exit the Amendment Changes window.