Getting Started

Welcome to Cothon. This guide introduces the platform and points you to the right place for your first tasks.

What is Cothon?

Cothon is a procurement intelligence platform for Canadian government contracting. It brings together tender discovery, AI-assisted bid analysis, proposal drafting, and market analytics in one workspace.

Core capabilities

Discover tenders Browse government tenders collected from Canadian sources such as CanadaBuys and Quebec's SEAO in the Tenders section, with search, filters, and saved filter presets.

Track opportunities Add tenders you care about to Opportunities, your working pipeline. Each opportunity gets its own workspace with tabs for documents, requirements, proposals, flagged terms, team, activity, similar opportunities, and lessons learned.

Analyze bids with AI Run an analysis on a tender or an opportunity's documents. The AI extracts requirements, labels each one by criticality (Mandatory, Point-Rated, or administrative), and matches them against your company profile with a status of Fully Meets, Partially Meets, or Cannot Meet.

Decide and pursue Bid decision guidance summarizes each opportunity as Recommend Bid, Consider Bid, Conditional, or No Bid. Opportunities you commit to appear in Active Bids, where you track deliverables and submission readiness.

Generate proposals Draft proposal content from a completed analysis, using your company profile and the extracted requirements as context.

Understand the market The Analytics section covers vendors, buyers, awards, and market trends across federal and Quebec data. The Dashboard condenses your own pipeline and market signals into one command view.

The main sections

The left sidebar is the map of the product:

• Dashboard — your command view: KPIs, daily brief, deadlines, and market panels
• Opportunities — the tenders you are tracking and working on
• Active Bids — opportunities you are actively bidding on, with deliverable tracking
• Tenders — the full feed of open government tenders
• Analytics — vendor, buyer, and market intelligence
• Bid Config — flagged terms and bid decision settings
• Company Profile — your capabilities, the basis for AI matching
• Lessons Learned — knowledge captured from past bids

See the Navigation Guide for details, including the command palette and the language toggle.

A typical first session

1. Set up your account and workspace. Sign up, follow the product tour, and — if your company gave you a claim code — link your workspace to your company's contracting history. See Account Setup.
2. Complete your company profile. Go to Company Profile and describe your capabilities and procurement industries. Matching quality depends directly on this.
3. Browse tenders. Open Tenders, filter to your industries, and save a filter preset for next time.
4. Run your first analysis. Pick a relevant tender and analyze it. See Your First Analysis.
5. Track what matters. Add promising tenders to Opportunities and watch your Dashboard come to life.

Plans

Cothon offers three subscription tiers:

• Free — access to the Tenders feed with basic search and filters
• Pro — unlocks opportunities, analytics, bid configuration, company profile, proposals, lessons learned, and organization intelligence
• Enterprise — custom pricing and everything in Pro

Locked sections show a lock icon in the sidebar. Manage your plan under Settings → Subscription.

Next steps

• Account Setup — sign-up, claim codes, security, and plans
• Your First Analysis — from tender to analyzed requirements
• Navigation Guide — master the interface
• Quick Wins — short workflows with immediate value
• Keyboard Shortcuts — the shortcuts that exist
• Glossary — procurement and platform terminology