What is difference between bid and tenders ?

Tender usually refers to the process whereby governments invite bids for their daily expenditure, projects and works that must be submitted within a finite deadline mainly know as Government Tenders, RFP, RFQ, Tender Notice etc.
 

Bids are the response against Tenders in specific format where bidder will offer their Prices for particular Product, Services & work for which tender been invited. 

If the buyer doesn’t have any idea of what kind of and what level of response the tender would attract, expression of interest would fulfill this requirement. In this, the authority gets to know the total number of interested parties, their experience type and the bidders get an opportunity to interact with the buyer without having to deposit money. Generally this stage is skipped and the objectives are achieved in RFQ stage as mostly the bidder population is known.

In RFQ stage, technical experience in particular sector, sub-sector, technology, geography, etc is checked along with financial capacity. The entire nature of future legal agreement is not revealed, the scope is not detailed. For routine large scale, long-term, complex, high value projects, two stage tendering is used. This gives buyer the idea how many total parties are interested, qualified and may bid. This eliminates the nuisance of having to evaluate the entire proposal of non-serious players. This also helps serious bidders as frivolous bidders are kept out. It helps buyer to achieve quality performance. It reduces the risk of a very high number of tender litigations. It reduces the risk of contract agreement being changed during pre-bid communications on suggestions of companies that wouldn’t qualify, would back out, wouldn’t participate, wouldn’t be able to perform, etc. This stage gives time to potential bidders to analyse project without keeping bid security.