RFQ platform vs email and Excel: an honest comparison

Most AV, ELV, and lighting packages in the GCC are still tendered the same way: a BOQ extract in Excel, a distribution list in Outlook, and a comparison sheet built by hand at the deadline. That method is free, familiar, and fine, right up to a specific set of breaking points. This is an honest look at where each approach wins, based on running packages both ways.

What email and Excel do well

Credit where due. Email and Excel need no onboarding, no approval from IT, and no explanation to a supplier who has been quoting this way for twenty years. For a simple package with two or three suppliers you already trust, the overhead of any tool exceeds the overhead of the problem. Plenty of AED 50K packages are awarded this way every week and nothing goes wrong.

The method also gives you total formatting freedom. A one-off request with unusual structure, staged deliveries, or a commercial arrangement that fits no standard template is sometimes genuinely easier in a hand-built spreadsheet. Our free RFQ template exists for exactly these cases, and using it well solves half of the problems below.

The four places the method breaks

• Comparability. Send a spreadsheet to six suppliers and you get back two filled-in files, three PDFs in the supplier letterhead format, and one price in the email body. Someone re-keys everything, and re-keying is where transcription errors enter the award decision.
• Clarifications. Bidder A asks a scope question and gets an answer bidders B through F never see. Now the bids are built on different assumptions, and the cheapest one is usually the one that assumed the least.
• Versions. The BOQ gets revised mid-tender. Some bidders price revision 2, some price revision 3, and the comparison sheet silently mixes both.
• Memory. Six months later, a variation dispute needs the tender record. It lives across three inboxes, one of which belongs to someone who left.

None of these are spreadsheet defects; they are coordination defects. They scale with bidder count, line-item count, and revision count, which is why the pain arrives exactly when the package matters most.

What a structured platform changes

There is a second-order effect that surprises buyers: bid quality rises when suppliers know the request is structured. A supplier answering inside a fixed format cannot leave lead time blank or bury an exclusion in paragraph nine of a PDF. The discipline the format imposes on them is the same discipline our guide on writing RFQs asks you to impose on yourself.

The honest trade-offs

A platform is a change of habit, and suppliers who live in email need a reason to follow you. On RFQsNow that reason is commercial: suppliers pay to unlock matched RFQs, so the ones who show up have already qualified themselves on the opportunity. Buyers pay nothing, which removes the usual procurement-software objection of per-seat licensing. Pricing sits entirely on the supplier side, as laid out on the pricing page.

The other trade-off is coverage. A platform is only useful where its supplier network is dense, which for RFQsNow means AV, ELV, lighting, and home automation in the UAE first, per our platform statistics. If you are buying structural steel, email remains your tool.

A sensible decision rule

Stay with email and Excel when the package is small, the bidder list is short and known, and the scope will not move. Use a platform when any of these hold: you need suppliers beyond your address book, the package has enough line items that re-keying bids risks errors, more than three bidders are involved, or the tender record matters contractually. For the full sourcing cycle a platform slots into, see the RFQ process on UAE projects.