A free spreadsheet template for keeping every live tender in one place, its stage, its value, who owns it, and when it needs a follow-up. Built for civil engineering firms and consultancies running business development alongside billable project work.
Who this is for
If your firm runs tenders through a spreadsheet already, or worse, through a mix of email threads and memory, this template gets everything into one consistent place without asking you to learn new software first. It's aimed at civil engineering firms and consultancies, typically 1 to 100 employees, where the people winning tenders, owners, principals, project managers, are the same people delivering the work.
What a spreadsheet can and can't do
We built this to actually be useful, not just as a way to
get your email address. A spreadsheet is a genuine improvement over a mix of inboxes and half-remembered conversations, and for a firm just getting its tenders organized for the first time, it's a reasonable place to start.
It has real limits too, and it's worth naming them rather than pretending otherwise:
- No reminders that surface on their own. The Follow-up Date column only works if someone remembers to check it. Nothing pings you when a date arrives.
- No shared, real-time view. If more than one person needs to update it, version issues and "who has the latest copy" problems show up quickly, especially once someone's editing from a site trailer and someone else is at a desk.
- No record of the conversations behind each tender. A cell can hold a short note, not a timeline of every call, email, and site visit that built the relationship.
- Manual, and slow at scale. A handful of tenders is easy to keep on top of. Twenty or thirty live at once, each with subcontractor quotes and a submission deadline, starts to strain what a spreadsheet can hold without something breaking down.
None of that makes this template a bad tool. It makes it what it is: a stopgap, built to get every live tender into one place while you decide whether you need something more.
When you outgrow it
Here's a rough sense of what "outgrowing it" tends to look like, and what it costs to ignore.
Say a firm has three people splitting business development duties, an owner, a principal, and a project manager, each spending roughly 20 minutes a day updating the tracker, chasing a subcontractor for pricing, or trying to remember whether a follow-up ever happened.
- 20 minutes/day × 3 people = 1 hour/day
- 1 hour/day × 20 working days/month = 20 hours/month
At a conservative blended rate for senior technical staff, that's a meaningful chunk of billable-equivalent time spent on manual tracking every month, before counting the tenders that slip because a follow-up date sat in a cell nobody checked.
That's the point Capsule CRM is built for. Instead of a static grid, tenders sit in a visual pipeline with automatic reminders, every client and subcontractor conversation attached to the same record, and a mobile app so an update from a site visit takes seconds rather than waiting until you're back at a desk. Capsule's Starter plan is built for firms of exactly this size, and there's a free plan for firms just getting started.
See how it works specifically for civil engineering firms on the CRM for Civil Engineering page, or start a free trial at capsulecrm.com/signup.
Frequently Asked Questions
Both. It's a standard .xlsx file, so it opens directly in Excel or uploads cleanly into Google Sheets.
Yes, but a shared spreadsheet is exactly where the "no real-time view" limitation shows up fastest. It works fine for one owner updating it, or a small team with a clear habit of checking in. Beyond that, it's usually a sign to look at something built for shared use.