Supplier A offers £105,000. Supplier B offers £98,000. The gap looks large enough to make the decision straightforward, until the exclusions are read.
In this example, Supplier B excludes access costing £6,500 and testing costing £4,000. Once those items are included, its comparable total is £108,500. The original quotation was cheaper because it covered less work.
The estimator’s task is to make that difference visible without rewriting the supplier’s offer. Keep the submitted price intact, then show each normalising adjustment in a separate column with its basis.
Supplier B requires assumed additions of £6,500 for access and £4,000 for testing. This is a worked example.
Ask before assuming
An ambiguous exclusion is a clarification, not an invitation to invent a price. Where a response is still outstanding, label the adjustment as provisional and record who is following it up.
Payment terms, programme commitments and quotation validity may also matter. They cannot always be reduced neatly to a monetary adjustment, but they should be visible to the person making the decision.
I would also check whether an adjustment duplicates something already carried in preliminaries or another package. Access is a common example: the project may already have allowed a shared scaffold.
A useful comparison lets the reviewer move between the submitted offer and the common-scope total. It should be possible to explain every movement. That discipline helps during negotiation and leaves a clearer record if the package changes before award.