Manage Agency

Your agency settings determine how the Bid Express® service works for your agency. Access your settings from the Manage Agency page by clicking Manage Agency Settings.  

Click to expand the following topics for more information about using your agency settings. 

Settings

General

In General you can:

• Modify plan holders
• Edit Eligible Bidder and Bidder ID list visibility
• Let contractors manually add themselves to a plan holders list or request bidder eligibility

Contacts

In Contact settings you can set the primary contact for your agency. This information is publicly displayed on the Contact Bid Express page under Agency Contacts.

Update your agency contact information

1. Click Agency Admin, located in the left navigation bar.
2. Click Manage Agency Settings in the agency box.
3. Navigate to the Contact section of the Manage Agency Settings.
4. Enter the new agency contact information.
5. Click Save.

Your agency contact information is now updated. You can see the updated information by clicking Contact Bid Express located in the top right right corner and scrolling to Contact Agencies.

Bidding Options

In Bidding Options, you can determine the global settings for how your agency will conduct bidding. Among other options, these include:

• Limit who is able to submit electronic bids to you
• Enable automatic bid withdrawal
• Determine how your bidders are named on apparent bids and bid submissions
• Set manual or automatic publishing of apparent bid results
• Show or hide DBE percentage for apparent bids
• Opt out of reviewing Requests to Bid as they are submitted by contractors

Reports

In your Reports settings, you can enter the variables for your LOAD configuration file (by default, this file is named load.cfg or load.xml) for the Digital ID signer field or the bid submission time.

Lettings

In Lettings you can:

• Update the default letting time. A time automatically appears when you create a new letting but can be edited.
• Update the time when the letting will be visible to contractors after you create a new letting. This also automatically appears when you create a new letting but can be edited.
• Set your preferences for the use of districts to help identify lettings for your agency.

Features

In Features, you can:

• Let bidders post questions about a specific proposal. You will have a place to answer them, publish the response, or delete the question.
• Enable Contract Documents, to post documents for the winning bidder of a proposal. If you are using the Doc Express service, you can also send the documents to a Doc Express contract.

Custom Fields

In Custom Fields you can add text fields for apparent bids or bidder eligibility. When you click to enable these fields, text boxes will appear for you to enter the custom field names. You can enter up to three custom fields for each one.

Note | Once saved, these fields will be immediately visible on all proposals and included in any proposal export. Changes made to these fields affect every apparent bid or eligibility request in the Bid Express system. No record is kept of previous field names.

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Agency Alerts

Post an Alert 

In Alerts, you can post and adjust agency alerts that are displayed on the agency home page of Bidx.

Post an alert to your agency's home page

1. Click Agency Admin to go to the Manage Agency page.
2. Click Manage Agency Alerts from the Agency section to go to the Manage Agency Alert page. The Alerts text box will appear.
3. Enter your message in the text box. Use the format buttons at the top of the text window to change the look of your text, including the size and color.
4. Click Preview to see your message. Click X to close the preview.
5. If you are ready, click Publish. If not, continue to update your message. Once you click Publish, your message appears at the top of your agency home page for all users.

Good to Know | Timestamps

• The text box automatically adds the date and time. You can edit or delete the timestamp if desired.
• The alert will appear on your page immediately after you publish it, even if you set the timestamp to a later time.

Contractors who are subscribed to receive alerts from your agency will get an email message when one is posted.

Note | Do not delete any previously published content from the Alerts text box unless you want to remove it from the home page.

Previously published alerts are not saved, they are only contained in the Alerts text box. To publish a new alert without deleting a previous message, press Enter to move the old content down the page and type your new alert at the top.

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Attachment Types

Manage Attachment Types

In Attachment Types you can set and name the types of attachments your agency uploads. These labels define what an attachment is for a bidder.

You can have as many attachments as you need. After you set your attachment types, uploaded files will display both the file name and the attachment type.