Send a bid confirmation

The invitation to bid is filed and its values are sitting on the case: the vendor, the project, the bid due date you captured in step 2. Now you turn around and produce paper of your own, a confirmation that says yes, we are bidding, here is our number, then put it in front of the right inbox. Building the template is the Free tier, The Filler. Everything that follows here leans on the case from step 2, so reusing those saved values, running against the case, and composing the draft from it are all part of the cases pipeline that opens up on Pro, The Operation.

Build the confirmation template

A confirmation needs two kinds of value. Most of it already lives on the case (the project name, the vendor, the due date the ITB gave you), and you reuse those rather than retyping them. But the bid amount is something the AI cannot read off any incoming document, because it does not exist yet: it is a number you decide. That is exactly what a question input is for, the one source that asks the person running the template to type a value into the Form tab. The rest of the fields reference values that already exist on the same case.

The question input is the load-bearing choice here. A static input would bake in one fixed number on every run, and an extracted input would send the AI hunting through the document for a figure that is not there. A question stops and asks you, once per run, so the same template serves every bid. The mechanics of placing each value on the page (dragging write zones, resizing from the corners) are the same canvas you learned in build a template; the fields that pull from the case rely on the stable-key wiring covered in cases and data, and remember a field can only reference data on its own case, never another.

Run it and compose the draft

This half runs on Pro, where cases exist. Open the case from step 2 and run the new template against it. Because the confirmation has a form question, the run prompt shows the Bid Amount field for you to fill, plus the run-only Special AI Instructions textarea (leave it blank unless this one confirmation is an outlier). Click Run Autofill and the finished PDF lands in Documents → Files Generated. The case now holds both papers: the ITB under Received, the confirmation under Generated.

To get it out the door you compose, you do not send. The app builds the email and creates a real draft in your own Gmail; you click Send yourself from Gmail's compose view. That review step is deliberate insurance against the wrong recipient or the wrong attachment, and it means the sender is always whoever is signed in, never the workspace owner. The full mechanics (saved send templates with tokenized subjects and per-category source rules, the compose capability, the 25 MB attachment cap) live in send templates and drafts.

That single case now carries the whole exchange so far: the invitation that came in, the confirmation that went out, and the data shared between them. One template molded both directions of the conversation.

Next: track the invoice, where the bid turns into work and the money starts to flow.