Most of a PQQ isn't writing

It's Thursday, half three. A supply-chain questionnaire lands from a main contractor you'd like to work for. Eighty-seven questions, due Monday at noon, through a portal you've never used.

Question 9 wants your employer's liability certificate. The broker sent the renewal in March, so it's in somebody's inbox. Question 23 wants your modern slavery statement, and there are three on the shared drive with no dates on them. Question 41 wants evidence of how you check your people's competence, which the H&S consultant has, and they're on site until Tuesday. Questions 60 to 64 want the same turnover figures you typed into the last questionnaire, and the one before that.

Then there are four free-text questions about how you'd approach their kind of job. That's the part that decides the score, and it gets written on Sunday night, by the MD, because everything else took until Friday.

At 11:50 on Monday the portal rejects your insurance schedule for being over 10MB. It's the one requirement nobody misses twice.

Most of a PQQ is filing, not writing

When we mapped where PQQ effort goes for a subcontractor of 20 to 200 people, the writing wasn't the main job. Roughly:

• Finding and collating documents: 30% to 40%
• Re-keying facts you've already typed somewhere else: 15% to 25%
• Checking what's expired and chasing replacements: 10% to 15%
• Adapting the free-text answers: 15% to 25%
• Review, sign-off and upload: 10% to 15%

Take the middle of each range and finding, retyping and chasing come to about two-thirds. The writing is about a fifth.

That split is the softest thing in this piece. It's our own estimate from working through how the questionnaires are built and who fills them in, not a survey, and your firm could sit at either end of every range. But it would have to be badly wrong for writing to come out as the main job.

That matters, because much of what's sold to subbies as "AI for tenders" goes after the writing. It's the most visible part and the easiest to demo. It's also the part where a wrong answer costs most: an invented claim in a PQQ is a false declaration with your company's name on it. Point a tool at the fifth and the two-thirds stays exactly where it was.

The hours aren't the expensive part

Here's a worked example on an invented firm, with the assumptions visible so you can swap in your own.

A 45-person mechanical and electrical subcontractor, CAS-certified, holding two other accreditations. Fifteen client questionnaires a year on top of CAS, at 12 hours each, plus 30 hours pulling evidence together for the annual CAS renewal. Admin time at £25 an hour, loaded (salary times 1.3, over about 1,800 productive hours a year).

That's 210 hours a year. Two-thirds of it, about 140 hours, is finding, retyping and chasing. At £25 an hour, roughly £3,500.

Nobody restructures a business for £3,500. If that were the whole cost, I'd tell you to leave it alone.

It isn't, for three reasons that don't show up on a timesheet.

The bid that fails on a document. An expired certificate or a missing policy can knock a submission out before anyone reads your method. Say that happens once a year on a £300,000 package, at a 10% gross margin. Both numbers are assumptions, not data. That's £30,000 of margin gone, more than eight times the hours bill, from one document nobody was watching.

The bids you never price. When a questionnaire takes two days to put together, firms quietly stop going for the marginal ones. It's probably the most expensive line of the three, and the one nobody can see, because it never happened.

Who's doing it. The £25 an hour assumes it's admin time. Often it isn't. Under about 20 people, it's usually a director, in the evening. Between 20 and 100, it's an office or compliance manager plus an outside H&S consultant. Either way, it's the people you'd least like spending Sunday on version control.

I can't size the lost bids for your firm. You can, in about ten minutes. Count the submissions in the last year that failed, or nearly failed, on a document, and the ones you passed on because nobody had time to put them together.

Answer once, then keep it current

Every questionnaire, whoever sends it, draws on the same dozen or so kinds of information: company details, finances, insurance, health and safety, building safety, quality, environmental, people and competence, governance and ethics, track record, capacity, and the free-text answers. The format changes. The facts don't.

So the fix is to stop answering questionnaires and start keeping answers.

• Every fact stored once, with the document it came from, who owns it and when it runs out. Turnover, insurance limits, accident rates, accreditation numbers. Typed once, then copied out, never retyped.
• One approved version of each standard statement. Modern slavery, equality, environmental policy, social value. Each with a review date and a name against it, so there are never three versions on the drive again.
• Dates watched for you. Certificates, insurances and accreditations flagged a month before they lapse, not discovered by a portal.
• A five-minute bid/no-bid check before anyone opens the portal. Do we hold what they're asking for? Is it all in date? Is this a job we'd actually win? If the answer's no, you've just saved two days.

None of that needs a new system on day one. A properly kept record of documents, owners and expiry dates gets you most of the way.

Once the facts live in one place, AI earns its keep. It can read certificates and policies as they arrive and pull out the dates and limits, match a new question to an answer you already hold, and draft the tailored paragraphs from your approved wording. A person still checks and signs every submission, because it's your declaration, not the software's.

It's the same paperwork our admin ledger piece looked at from the main contractor's side, and the same first move.

CAS Version 6 is the natural moment to start

Build UK publishes Version 6 of the Common Assessment Standard on 1 November (NFRC (opens in new tab)). Competence questions move into the Quality section, so every supplier answers them. Firms whose work isn't covered by the Building Regulations, which includes a lot of scaffolding and temporary works contractors, opt out of the Building Safety section instead. There's also new guidance on acceptable evidence, plus updates on fraud prevention and information security.

If you renew after 1 November, you'll be answering the new questions anyway. That's the moment to sort out the evidence underneath them once, rather than against another deadline.

The standard isn't going away either. Build UK's own guidance says central government and the wider public sector should use CAS to pre-qualify suppliers (opens in new tab). And on public work, the Central Digital Platform (opens in new tab) has held suppliers' core information since the Procurement Act went live on 24 February 2025. It's the same idea, described by one law firm as a "tell us once" approach (opens in new tab). Keeping it accurate is still your job.