Where Orders Actually Come From: Why Price Isn't the First Thing That Decides

Imagine a Friday evening. You spent two hours calculating what the work would cost, another hour rewriting your message to sound professional, and hit ‘send’ at 11:40 PM. Monday brings a reply. Short. Not a single word about your price — no ‘too expensive,’ no ‘too cheap,’ no ‘we chose someone else because they quoted less.’ It says your proposal is not being considered.

And this is the most unpleasant feeling in all of entrepreneurship: you lost a competition you never actually entered. No comparison, no conversation, no chance to explain anything. You were simply not let through the door where that comparison was taking place.

When this happens two or three times, it’s tempting to draw one conclusion — you need to search more actively. One more listings site, one more group, one more search query along the lines of ‘aufträge finden kostenlos.’ The logic makes sense: not enough orders, so look harder. But before adding another search channel, check the stated reasons for rejection. You may be preparing for a conversation about price while the contracting authority needs evidence of something else. More searching can help find opportunities; it cannot by itself close a gap in eligibility.

The word ‘order’ hides two different mechanisms, and confusing them can be costly. On the surface everything looks similar: someone needs work done, and there’s you, who can do it. Inside — different rules of the game.

The first world is an ordinary private client. A cafe owner, an apartment building manager, a manager at a small firm. Recommendations, a site visit and a conversation about terms can carry considerable weight. A private client generally has more discretion in choosing a supplier than a public contracting authority: they may prefer a more expensive offer because they trust the team or find communication easier. That does not make private transactions free of legal or contractual obligations. The useful distinction here is the purchasing process, not an absence of rules.

The second world is public procurement — for example, a municipality commissioning work through a procurement procedure. In Germany, § 97 of the law against restrictions on competition, GWB, sets out competition, transparency, economic efficiency, proportionality and equal treatment. Unequal treatment is permitted only where EU law or a federal law requires or permits it. There is a scope limit: under § 106, this part of the GWB applies when the estimated contract value excluding VAT reaches the applicable threshold. It should not be presented as the complete rulebook for every small municipal purchase. The VgV provisions discussed below must likewise be read within their applicable scope; check which rules the particular procedure uses.

Read ‘equal treatment’ slowly, because it explains much of the formality. An authority cannot simply overlook your missing evidence as a personal favor. But equal treatment does not mean that documents can never be supplied later. Where § 56 VgV applies, the authority may request missing documents or the supplementation, explanation or correction of incomplete or incorrect documents, subject to transparency and equal treatment. It may also announce in the notice or procurement documents that it will not request additional documents. There are limits for documents affecting evaluation against award criteria, and any permitted response must meet the deadline the authority sets. A formal request under those rules is different from an informal promise to bring something tomorrow.

Negotiation is not universally forbidden. § 17 VgV expressly provides for negotiated procedures: negotiations concern initial and subsequent offers, excluding final offers, and cannot change the specified minimum requirements or award criteria. Bidders must be treated equally. The authority can also reserve the option to award on the initial offers without negotiating. So the practical question is which procedure you are entering and what it permits, not whether every public client will bargain with you.

From this comes the first practical decision to make before you even open the first listings portal: decide which world you’re currently searching in. If private — invest in being known and trusted, while checking the client’s requirements. If public — invest in understanding the procedure and being able to demonstrate that you meet its conditions. These are different preparation tasks; distinguishing them helps you avoid spending months on the wrong kind of work.

In the German procedure there’s a concept called Eignung — eligibility. This isn’t a general assessment of your firm — not ‘are you a good craftsperson or not.’ It’s the answer to a very narrow question: is this particular business capable of properly carrying out this particular contract.

§ 122 GWB states: public contracts go to professional and capable — that is, eligible — businesses that have not been excluded under §§ 123 or 124. The contracting authority sets the specific eligibility criteria, but not without limits. They may concern only authorization to pursue the professional activity, economic and financial standing, or technical and professional ability. The criteria and required evidence must relate to the contract and be proportionate to its subject and value; they must also be identified in the specified notice or invitation, with a precisely located direct link to the procurement documents permitted under the provision. ‘The authority sets the criteria’ does not mean it can invent any requirement it likes.

This is where a newcomer’s intuition can break down. You think there’s some single exam you take once and that’s it: get certified as a ‘proper company’ — and from then on you’re let in everywhere. In reality you need to check the criteria for each contract, even when many requirements repeat. For cleaning an office building — Gebäudereinigung — eligibility can mean one thing. For installing ventilation in a school — something different. The same company can be eligible in the first case and ineligible in the second, and there’s nothing contradictory about that. Prequalification can provide all or part of the evidence under § 122(3); it does not turn every future contract into an automatic fit.

Why You Read the Criteria Before Opening the Calculator

The practical conclusion is simple and a little unromantic: read the criteria before calculating the price in detail. Not ‘I’ll estimate everything first and then check the conditions,’ but the other way around. If a published eligibility requirement calls for experience you do not have, a low price does not establish that eligibility. That is a useful order for your preparation, not a claim that every authority must finish checking eligibility before it even looks at prices. Also distinguish a missing qualification from a missing document: evidence of an existing qualification may raise a supplementation question; an absent qualification is a different problem.

Take a hypothetical example, not a report of an actual procurement or a universal rule for kindergartens. Iryna has a crew of four people and has been cleaning apartment building entryways for three years. She sees a listing for cleaning a municipal kindergarten and happily starts calculating square meters. In this invented case, her price is the lowest — she is small and has lower overhead. But assume the published, applicable eligibility criteria require relevant experience with facilities used by children, which she lacks. The documents also ask separately for a cleaning method statement, including how disinfectants will be handled; that is not automatically an eligibility criterion. Her offer fails the assumed experience requirement. The lower price does not cure it, and the missing method statement is a separate issue whose treatment depends on the procedure and documents. Iryna had never read that far because she rushed to the calculator.

A second hypothetical example — Taras, HVAC installation. He does have experience, and specifically on public-sector facilities. But the criteria require proof of staff qualifications, and one of his key installers works as a separate subcontractor with their own documents. Taras decides this is a formality and submits whatever is on hand. The problem in this example is not the mere use of a subcontractor: Taras has not established which evidence the procedure requires for that person’s role, whether he has it, and when it must be submitted. A qualification may exist while its required proof is still missing; whether that gap can be corrected must be checked under the applicable rules.

The difference between Iryna and Taras is important and captures two useful distinctions. Iryna didn’t read — she assumed the main thing in a listing was the scope of work, and missed a requirement she could not meet. Taras read, but treated evidence requirements as boilerplate no one would check. Both need to take the published conditions seriously, while separating ‘we do not meet this’ from ‘we have not documented this.’ If the wording is unclear, a question through the procedure’s designated communication channel is more useful than assuming either that the requirement can be ignored or that rejection is inevitable.

There’s another category of reasons why a business may be excluded from a procedure, and a tidy folder alone does not resolve it. These concern underlying circumstances, rather than merely how neatly you assemble the application.

§ 123 GWB calls these zwingende Ausschlussgründe — mandatory grounds for exclusion. Under paragraph 1, exclusion can occur at any stage when the authority knows of a final conviction for one of the listed offenses involving a person whose conduct is attributable to the company under paragraph 3, or of a final fine imposed on the company under § 30 OWiG for such an offense. Attribution concerns responsibility for management, including management supervision or other control powers in a senior role. This is more specific than ‘any employee has a conviction’ or ‘the company has received any fine.’ Paragraph 4 also covers failure to pay taxes, levies or social-security contributions where established by the specified final decision or otherwise appropriately demonstrated by the authority.

Pay attention to ‘at any stage’: the issue is not confined to the entry point. ‘Mandatory’ also matters — a strong offer or personal goodwill does not by itself remove a ground for exclusion. But the rule is not exceptionless. § 123(4) says its exclusion rule does not apply when the company has paid or committed to pay the relevant taxes, levies and contributions, including the specified interest and surcharges. Paragraph 5 permits exceptions for compelling public-interest reasons and, for paragraph 4, where exclusion would be manifestly disproportionate. It also leaves § 125 unaffected. Those provisions need assessment in the actual case; they are neither a blanket promise of exclusion nor a ready-made route around it.

These checks help explain why the system looks formal: an authority needs to establish eligibility and the absence of relevant exclusion grounds, not merely whether it likes your work. Yet ‘they cannot take anyone’s word for it’ would be misleading. § 122(3) says proof of eligibility and the absence of exclusion grounds should be provided through self-declarations; documents beyond those declarations should be requested during the procedure only from promising candidates or tenderers. Prequalification may supply all or part of the proof. A required self-declaration is a formal means of evidence, not an informal favor. Read which declarations and later supporting documents your procedure actually requires.

And here — the nicer part of the law. The same § 97, paragraph 4, says that Mittelstand interests — those of small and medium-sized businesses — must receive priority consideration when public contracts are awarded. This isn’t a guarantee, it’s not a quota, and no one promises you any result. It gives a statutory basis for considering those interests; it does not establish that size never creates practical difficulties or that preparation alone secures admission. For a small business, the useful question remains whether the specific requirements fit its capabilities and can be demonstrated.

A practical source of avoidable trouble is a last-minute scramble. Imagine finding a listing on Wednesday with a Friday deadline: you’re chasing paperwork instead of thinking about the actual work. The following folder, checklist and review rhythm are our editorial working method, not a checklist prescribed by the cited laws.

That’s why much of the preparation can be done when there’s no listing in front of you at all. This sounds dull, because on those days nothing is on fire and other things seem more important. But those quiet days can determine whether you make it in time or not.

Set up a single folder — physical or in the cloud, doesn’t matter — and keep a basic company profile there: relevant registration documents, status confirmations, insurance papers, personnel and equipment data, a brief description of completed work with contacts of clients willing to confirm it. This isn’t a universal tender package or a requirement to submit everything: it’s your reusable business portfolio. Go through it once a quarter to see what needs updating, and check the required currency and format again for each submission. A document being in your folder does not establish that it is the right evidence for this contract.

How to Work Through a Specific Listing

Next comes the criteria list. When you read a listing and its linked documents, write out every eligibility requirement in a column, and next to each one put ‘have it,’ ‘have it but needs updating,’ or ‘don’t have it.’ Record the document location, the required evidence and the submission stage; mark unclear points as questions rather than guessing. Keep eligibility separate from requirements for the proposed work and from award criteria. If a critical requirement genuinely cannot be met for this procedure, don’t spend your evening on a full calculation. Instead, write that gap down as a task for the coming months. If only the evidence is missing or the wording is unclear, establish what is required and what the procedure permits before treating it as a definite no. This way rejection reasons become a list of things to build, not simply a feeling of defeat.

Applied to the fictional Iryna example, the list has three different entries. ‘Relevant experience’ is ‘don’t have it’ under the assumed criterion, so the low-price calculation stops until that point is resolved. ‘Evidence of existing residential-cleaning work’ is ‘have it,’ but it does not automatically satisfy the different experience requirement. ‘Cleaning method statement’ is ‘needs preparing’ under the requirements for the proposed work, not automatically under eligibility. This small exercise shows why counting attachments is not enough: the question is what each item is meant to establish. The example does not determine whether any real kindergarten’s requirement would be proportionate.

Third — a person and a deadline. Every submission needs one name who is responsible for it, and a date by which everything is ready. Not simply ‘by the deadline,’ but before it, leaving time for a final check and submission. Do not build the plan around an assumed extension or a later request for documents: permitted supplementation is not a general extension of the offer deadline.

Fourth — a log. A simple table: where you applied, when, how it ended, and what the stated reason was. After a while it may tell you more than general advice. If, hypothetically, eight out of ten recorded rejections cite the same missing evidence, that gives you a concrete preparation task; it is not a statistic about procurement generally. Where no reason is given, record ‘unknown’ rather than guessing. Looking at patterns like this across channels — not by gut feel, but from recorded data — is one useful role for analytics: it can help distinguish channels that lead to consideration from those consuming time without a documented result.

And fifth, the most boring and most useful thing. Much of what goes into an application can repeat from one submission to the next: the same company information, descriptions and attachments in a slightly different order. Assembling everything by hand from scratch creates opportunities for version errors and omissions. Pulling recurring documents from a maintained source can leave more attention for what is unique about this particular contract. This is where automating document preparation can make sense — so that on Friday evening you’re not searching for the current version of a certificate. Automation still needs a final check against the actual requirements; it does not establish eligibility, guarantee completeness or submit the right evidence merely because a file exists.

Change the way you look at listings. Alongside the opportunity, look at the conditions for taking part and being considered. In the framework described here, eligibility and exclusion grounds matter independently of a competitive price. Checking them early is our recommended preparation order; the cited provisions do not establish one universal sequence in which every authority reads and evaluates offers. Nor should you assume that the comparison is only about numbers: read the published award criteria as well. Your calculator remains useful once you know what you are preparing an offer for.

This is, incidentally, good news. Lowering a price has limits: reducing it below the costs included in your calculation creates a shortfall that must be covered. Readiness, on the other hand, can accumulate. Every document compiled, every confirmed project and every gap closed can help a future submission. That preparation still needs maintenance: evidence can become outdated, and a future contract may require something different. The value lies in having a stronger starting point, not a permanent pass into every procedure.

The first step today is one step: take the last listing that interested you and calculate nothing yet. Just write out the requirements for participants and honestly mark each one ‘have it,’ ‘needs updating,’ ‘don’t have it’ or ‘unclear.’ Include where each requirement appears and when its evidence is due. That column gives you a concrete preparation plan alongside your search for new listings. It does not answer unresolved legal questions, but it makes those questions visible before you invest the evening in a price.

This article explains the general logic, not your specific procedure: every procurement’s conditions are read individually, and for legal questions about a specific listing, consult a specialist.