Scoring Settings

The Bid Config page is where you tune how Cothon scores bid decisions. Every organization weighs capability, competition, effort, and risk differently — this page lets the model reflect your judgment. Changes apply to bid decisions calculated after you save.

Live preview

At the top of the page, a live preview scores a sample tender with your current settings. As you drag a weight slider or move a threshold, the sample's composite score and recommendation update instantly — so you can see the effect of a change before saving it.

Scoring weights

Four sliders control how much each component contributes to the composite score:

The weights always sum to 100 — raising one automatically rebalances the others — and each weight is clamped between 10 and 70, so no component can be silenced entirely or allowed to dominate outright.

Decision thresholds

Three thresholds map the composite score to a recommendation:

• Strong Bid — default ≥ 75 (adjustable between 60 and 95)
• Consider Bid — default ≥ 60 (must stay below the Strong Bid threshold)
• Conditional Bid — default ≥ 45 (must stay below the Consider Bid threshold)

Anything below the Conditional threshold is a No Bid. The page enforces the ordering, so the bands can never overlap.

Effort estimation

The effort vs. opportunity component needs to know what a proposal costs you:

• Hourly rate — default $150/hour; your blended cost of proposal labour.
• Hours per requirement — default 0.5 hours; how long your team spends responding to a single requirement.
• Base overhead hours — default 8 hours; the fixed cost of any bid (formatting, review, submission) regardless of size.

The page shows the live formula with your numbers: estimated hours are the requirement count times hours-per-requirement plus overhead, and estimated cost is hours times your hourly rate. This estimated cost is compared against the contract value to produce the ROI signal in the decision score.

Hard gates

Gates are pass/fail checks that sit above the scoring model:

• Require all critical requirements met — on by default. If the bid analysis found mandatory requirements you cannot meet, the recommendation is forced to No Bid.
• Maximum critical gaps — only active when the toggle above is off; allows up to N unmet critical requirements before forcing No Bid.
• Minimum timeline buffer — default 3 days; opportunities closing with less preparation time than this are penalized in the risk component.

Flagged terms

Flagged terms are words and phrases you want highlighted whenever they appear in analyzed documents — they feed the risk component and the analysis views. Each term has a category:

• Risk — e.g. "unlimited liability", "liquidated damages"
• Legal — e.g. "indemnification"
• Financial — e.g. "holdback", "payment upon acceptance"
• Technical — e.g. technologies you cannot support
• Opportunity — positive signals you want surfaced, e.g. "multi-year renewal"
• Other — anything else

Add, edit, and delete terms directly on the page.

Other controls

• Reset to defaults — restores every weight, threshold, and effort setting to the values shown above.
• Quick links — shortcuts to the Performance Dashboard and to your company profile capabilities, the two places most likely to need attention when scores look off.