If you’re working on bids and proposals, you’re probably working under intense time pressure to meet deadlines, with multiple sources, contributors, subject matter experts, and reviewers each with various levels of input.

Any mistake, no matter how small, could be the mistake that costs you the win.

That’s why proposal writers use PerfectIt to locate difficult-to-find errors such as consistency mistakes, spelling and capitalization preferences and acronym definitions. Here’s how it works.

Get the free trial from our website, with no credit card or personal information required. Then just load it from MS Word.

Click Start to run and PerfectIt scans your document.

The first check it runs is hyphenation. Where it finds a possible inconsistency, it gives you the choice.

Here it finds cooperation with and without a hyphen.

Every decision is left to the user. You choose the version you prefer… so let’s choose cooperation without a hyphen. Then all possible locations to fix are shown below.

Check each location, look at the context carefully, and click Fix for any items you want to change. If you change your mind, click Undo. Now we’ve made hyphenation consistent, let’s click Next to move to the next check.

Many global teams are receiving contributions from subject matter experts from different parts of the world, using different spellings and terminology. PerfectIt is great for spotting these inconsistencies and helping you to ensure your proposal speaks with ‘one voice’. For example, here the word organize takes an S in some locations, but a Z in others. Depending on what country you’re in, both spellings might be allowed. But they don’t normally belong in the same document.

If we prefer the version with the S, we click that. Then below are all the locations to fix.

If we prefer the version with the Z, we click that, then we fix these ones instead.

Still, we always check the context. English has lots of exceptions and there might be a direct quote or other reason for the inconsistency.

Let’s click Next again. PerfectIt looks for acronyms and their definitions. It finds if the acronym is used before a definition, if it’s defined twice and lots of other issues. This one is PerfectIt’s check for acronyms that haven’t been defined.

To correct this, we can move to the document and back to PerfectIt to make changes as we go. I click the location. Then switch over to make the changes in Word. I fill in the definition. Then click back to PerfectIt for the next location. When we’re done, click Next.

Here’s PerfectIt’s check for Capitalization of Phrases. In this document, it finds the word Government with a capital and with a lowercase g. In bids, frequent inconsistencies come up in terms such as council, specification, agreement, contract services and proposal.

What you can see is that errors that might take hours to find, are corrected in seconds. And there’s so much more. You can use PerfectIt to generate a table of acronyms.

And if we go back to the beginning, you can see all of the checks available. We can use PerfectIt to check:

• Bulleted lists

• Numbers in sentences

• Headings

• And much more.

The time saving is incredible. And it gives you the quality and assurance you need when working collaboratively. Microsoft’s own proposal team uses PerfectIt; and in a survey, Microsoft found PerfectIt saves each of their proposal writers an hour every week. PerfectIt is inexpensive, so those time savings mean that it pays for itself almost instantly.

And that’s not all! You can build your house style and prospective buyer’s preferences into PerfectIt.

If you regularly deal with certain buyers, PerfectIt can help you to feed insider language back to the prospect in your proposal. So you have the confidence that your winning messages are clear and accurate.

Get the free trial or buy now to start correcting your proposals and saving time today.