Your First Analysis

This tutorial walks through a complete first analysis: pick a tender, run the AI analysis, review the extracted requirements and capability matches, and read the bid decision guidance.

Before you start

• Complete your Company Profile first. Requirement matching compares each extracted requirement against your documented capabilities, so an empty profile produces weak matches.
• Analysis features require a Pro plan (or trial). On the Free tier you can browse tenders but not analyze them.

Step 1 — Find a tender

Open Tenders in the sidebar. Search and filter the feed of open government tenders by keywords, category, and other criteria, and save a filter preset if you expect to reuse it. Click a row to open the tender's detail page and read the raw notice.

Step 2 — Run the analysis

From the tender, choose Analyze. Cothon retrieves the tender's documents and runs the AI analysis pipeline over them. Progress is visible while the job runs, and the sidebar shows an indicator for in-flight analyses so you can navigate elsewhere in the meantime.

If the tender was already analyzed, Cothon tells you and reuses the existing results instead of re-processing.

When the analysis completes you are taken to the tender's opportunity workspace — the working page for everything related to this pursuit, with tabs for Overview, Documents, Requirements, Proposals, Flagged Terms, Team, Activity, Similar Opportunities, and Lessons.

Analyzing documents from the workspace

You can also work in the other direction: track a tender as an opportunity first, then open its Documents tab to fetch the source documents and analyze them from there. Opportunities you create manually can be analyzed the same way once documents are attached.

Step 3 — Review the requirements

Open the Requirements tab. Each extracted requirement shows:

Criticality — how the requirement affects your bid:

• Mandatory — pass/fail; failing one makes the bid non-compliant
• Point-Rated — scored during evaluation; strength here wins points
• Administrative — procedural obligations (formats, deadlines, signatures)

Match status — how your company profile lines up:

• Fully Meets — your documented capabilities cover the requirement
• Partially Meets — partial coverage or gaps to close
• Cannot Meet — no supporting capability found

Unmet mandatory requirements are pinned to the top of the list because they decide compliance on their own. Requirements can be filtered and browsed in different view modes, and each one opens into a detail drawer with its source text and match reasoning.

Step 4 — Check flagged terms

The Flagged Terms tab highlights occurrences of terms you configured in Bid Config — risk language, disqualifiers, or opportunity signals you want surfaced in every document. Review them before committing effort to the bid.

Step 5 — Read the bid decision guidance

The workspace summarizes the analysis into one of four bid decision recommendations:

• Recommend Bid — strong alignment
• Consider Bid — viable, worth a closer look
• Conditional — feasible only if specific gaps are addressed
• No Bid — poor fit or blocking non-compliance

The recommendation reflects your capability matches and the settings in Bid Config; the decision itself stays yours.

Step 6 — Act on the result

• Pursuing it? Set the opportunity's status accordingly and manage the pursuit from Active Bids, where deliverables and submission readiness are tracked.
• Drafting? Use the Proposals tab to generate draft content grounded in the extracted requirements and your company profile.
• Passing? Record why in Lessons Learned so the reasoning is available next time a similar tender appears.

Troubleshooting

• Weak or missing matches — enrich your Company Profile; matching is only as good as the documented capabilities.
• Analysis not finishing — check the progress indicator in the sidebar; you can retry the analysis from the tender.
• Locked features — analysis, proposals, and bid configuration require a Pro plan; locked items show a lock icon in the sidebar.

Next steps

• Bid Analysis — the analysis pipeline in depth
• Bid Decision — how the recommendation is built
• Quick Wins — more short, high-value workflows