Workchute is a lead marketplace. A bid opens a conversation; it does not award a contract, select a vendor, collect payment, or close the job. The customer and vendor decide how to work together outside those assumptions while Workchute tracks listing, completion, and reciprocal-review state.
Compare bid cards
Customer cards lead with the vendor's name, published review stars and count, and the proposed price, currency and pricing unit. Open the vendor's name to read their profile. A provider with no published reviews shows five empty stars and zero reviews. Private or held reviews do not contribute to that summary. An unpriced bid says Price not provided.
In Leads Bids, Your bid identifies your proposed amount and pricing unit beside the proposal and submitted time, above the job title, categories and coarse postal or ZIP location. Open the price or job title to return to the bid workflow. My Jobs Jobs shows vendor initials, names, ratings and review counts under Incoming bids. The submitted-time link opens authorized actions on the job; No reviews appears when none are published. Completion requests keep their Confirm/Decline workflow in place of the ordinary bid card.
Send interest in an open job
Unpriced and zero-value bids display Open.
On Job Detail, category tags appear above Description and link to Marketplace results for that category. Property, Location and Urgency appear below it, followed by the quieter Desired start and Desired completion dates. An unspecified desired date shows Flexible. The view count appears beneath the title; poster identity and reviews appear only when your access allows them.
A signed-in party user with completed personal onboarding and Bid + chat access can bid on another party's open, unexpired job. Every active coworker can read the party's outgoing bids, but Read-only, Chat-only, and Manage-jobs-only members cannot create, update, or withdraw them. On the job page, Send interest asks for:
an optional amount and pricing unit; leave the amount blank to send an unpriced bid;
a required opening message explaining how the vendor can help.
The job's country determines the displayed currency; the bidder does not select another currency. Pricing units come from the current Workchute catalog, so use the choices shown by the form. An initial bid cannot include an attachment. An entered amount needs a unit. Errors appear above the bid form and keep your message for correction. New bids appear on an open job automatically.
Submitting a first bid creates the bid and its chat conversation together. If either part cannot be created, neither should appear as successfully sent. A current submitted bid can use Update Bid to change its pricing. Its original message remains the opening conversation message. Use chat for later details or documents after the customer replies.
Withdraw ends a still-submitted vendor bid and deactivates its conversation. It is not the same as temporarily hiding the bid, and Workchute does not present a restore action to the vendor.
Leads Bids enables Withdraw beside an eligible outgoing bid when you have live Bid + chat access. Open the job for available conversation actions. Withdraw uses an explicit form submission with the existing server checks; it is never triggered by opening the card. Read-only coworkers keep the available job and history links without gaining bid or chat permission from the design.
A signed-out visitor can save a private, expiring bid draft in the same browser. After sign-up or sign-in and onboarding, the recovered page still requires an explicit Send action from a user with Bid + chat. Recovery never submits the bid automatically, and an expired or wrong-browser draft must be started again.
Review incoming bids as the customer
Every active member can read the Bids section when incoming bids exist. Each row can show the vendor profile, submitted time, pricing, an opening-message preview, and the actions currently valid for that bid. Only the owner or a Manage jobs member can reject or manually restore an incoming bid, close the job, handle completion, or submit or skip reviews. Use Older bids to continue through a long history; Workchute keeps the server's ordering rather than sorting only the visible page.
For an active submitted bid, the customer can Message the vendor or Reject the bid. Reject is a private workbench disposition: it moves that bid behind active interest and removes actions that require an active disposition, but it does not invent a new vendor bid status or select another vendor. While the job is still open, Restore returns it to active consideration. Rejection mutes customer alerts for that conversation. A customer message in the same job conversation also restores the bid, using ordinary Chat permission.
The customer's first qualifying text reply in the bid conversation marks that conversation as engaged. Engagement is still required before a vendor can request completion or a customer with Manage jobs can share the service address. It is not required for the customer's later completed-close review choice: work may have been coordinated off Workchute.
Complete or close a job
A customer-side owner or Manage jobs member can choose Close Job, then Cancel, Close complete, or Close incomplete. Close complete opens the review page; the job stays open until you finish. Close incomplete is a final closure without a review.
On an incoming bid, Message and Reject sit together, with Close & Review below. Close & Review opens the same completion flow with that vendor selected. When choosing a vendor yourself, use the dropdown of eligible bidders. It shows their name, picture and quote, with the most active job conversations first. Rejected and withdrawn bidders are excluded. There is no search for vendors outside the job. A qualifying customer chat reply is not required to review a bidder whose work was arranged elsewhere.
On the customer's completion review page:
Cancel leaves the job open. Browser Back before submitting also leaves it open.
Skip closes the job as complete without a review.
Submit closes the job as complete with your review.
A completed job appears in the customer's Completed jobs even when the review is skipped. A selected completing vendor can also see qualifying work in Completed bids. Merely placing a bid or writing a review does not qualify a vendor as the completing party. Archived detail access remains separately protected.
An eligible engaged vendor-side Manage jobs user can choose Request completion beside their bid. On that page, Cancel sends nothing, Skip sends the completion request without a review, and Submit sends it with the vendor's review. A vendor request never closes the customer's job. The customer can Decline, or choose Confirm to open their completion review page. Confirm alone does not close the job; the customer's final Skip or Submit does.
A pending request can be withdrawn by the vendor. Withdrawal, decline or request expiry leaves the job open and may require a wait before another request. A final customer closure ends bidding, resolves competing requests and makes the job conversations read-only together.
Successful completion, request and review actions return you to Marketplace. A five-star celebration, when played, does not delay that return. Reviews remain private until the existing reciprocal-review or release rules allow publication. Listing expiry is different: it removes a job from Marketplace but never asserts that work was complete. Trust the current dates and controls shown by the app for response and review deadlines.
Recover when an action is unavailable
Controls disappear as state changes. Reopen the canonical job page when a bid, completion, close, or review action says it is no longer available. Confirm the job is still open when bidding, that the same party owns the bid or job, and that the current conversation and deadline still qualify.
Do not repeat a high-consequence action only because the browser response was interrupted. First inspect the job, Leads Bids or Completed bids, chat, and notifications for the resulting state. If the first submission actually succeeded, the refreshed page will replace the form with the next valid action or remove it entirely.