Timing of payments

11.18  Affordability and cashflow can often be eased by adjusting the payment profile, for example contributions or phased payment build up. These methods can materially reduce the unitary payments and thus using different assumptions can make comparability between bids difficult. To ease this problem participants should be asked to run one financial model based upon standard assumptions and then provide a sensitised version of the model identifying the participant's proposed structure with an explanation of the variances.