If the call is not written down, the meeting never happened.

When do you use it?

At the gate, every gate: week-one qualification, pricing requalification, and any reversal in between. The meeting produces the discussion; this record produces the decision a partner who was not in the room can read. Start it in the meeting, finish it the same day; a record completed a week later is reconstruction, not evidence.

What goes in each field?

• Version. Number and date. Version 1 is the first call; reversals increment, never overwrite.
• Opportunity. Buyer, title, value band, close date: enough to file it.
• Recommendation. Bid, no-bid, or review: one word, then the sentence behind it.
• Recommended by. The person accountable for the recommendation, per the authority model.
• Veto holders. Who could stop it: delivery, finance, managing director, and whether each cleared, blocked, or abstained.
• Exceptions. Departures, qualifications, and conditions attached, each with an owner.
• Evidence. Clauses, criteria, capacity facts, and numbers the call rests on: pointers, not prose.
• Recheck. Date and trigger for the next look: pricing, shortlisting, or a named event.

What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?

The record is the call made durable: versioned, vetoed, evidenced, and rechecked. A gate without one degrades into memory within a fortnight, and memory always favours the hours already spent. When pricing changes the facts, the second gate gets its own version: re-qualifying at pricing.