Ten statuses at once: why a process needs a phase per bidder

Ask a deal team where a process stands and you get a paragraph, not a word. "Ardent has a binding offer in, Nordlicht is finishing due diligence and has asked for exclusivity, Helder dropped out after the management presentation, two others never signed the NDA." That paragraph is the true state of the deal. A field called "status" with the value "due diligence" is not.

The process has a status. So does every bidder.

Two different things are being tracked. The process itself moves through pending, active discussions, NBO, due diligence, SPA, closing. That is a useful high-level marker. But underneath it, each counterparty is in its own phase, from first approach to closing, and those phases do not move together. A process "in due diligence" may have one bidder in DD, one waiting for a data room invitation and one already at a binding offer.

Keeping a phase per bidder is what lets you answer the questions that matter on a Monday: who is still in, who is ahead, who has gone quiet, and what is the highest number on the table right now.

Ardent Capital, 10 Binding offer, € 5.0m, last contact 2 Sep
Nordlicht Partners, 08 Due diligence, € 4.6m, last contact 22 Aug
Helder Group, dropped 14 Jul after management presentation, € 4.1m

What a dropped bidder is for

A bidder that drops out is not deleted. It gets a drop-out date and a reason, and it stays in the list, greyed out. Three reasons. First, the fee forecast: the highest bid still in the process is the base, and a dropped bidder's number must stop counting the moment they leave. Second, the data room: their access expires on the same date, and the fact that they were in is information you want to keep. Third, the evaluation afterwards: why parties dropped out is the most useful thing you learn from a process, and it only gets written down if there is a field for it.

Bidders before they are relations

In the first weeks of a process, not every counterparty is a proper relation in your system yet. Some are a name and an e-mail address from an advisor. The bidder list should accept that: a bidder is preferably a relation, so that data room access and portal login work, but it may be just a name until it becomes serious. Forcing a full relation record on day one is how bidders end up in a spreadsheet instead.

None of this is exotic. It is the paragraph the deal team already says out loud, given a place to live.