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Our school purchasing department needs to be able to upload a couple of documents with bid text online.

A few things that they need:
Post a description of the purchase bid
Upload a document that will be linked inside the bid description
The bid will need to auto expire

I thought about doing it with forums software, but I cant find any that will make a thread auto expire.

Any ideas please?  Thanks!

Almost any content item in Joomla has a "stop publishing" date.  That should solve your auto-expire problem.

If you need to be able to download the bid documents, you could also install Docman with the JCE plugin to insert a download into a content item (this also requires JCE wysiwyg editor installed too of course).