How We Actually Build a Bid Accelerator Report (And Why We Don't Trust General-Purpose AI to Do It)

We've been analysing government tenders full-time for a while now. We've looked at the tender documents, the addenda, the contract conditions. We've cross-referenced the outcomes (who won, at what price, from which agency) across 140,000 historical contract awards on AusTender.

Here's what that looks like in practice. A typical federal tender has an RFT document, one or more schedules, a conditions of contract, often a Statement of Requirements, and almost always a set of addenda issued between publication and close. The average complex tender we've analysed has had 4 to 11 addenda.

Addenda change things. They modify evaluation criteria. They add mandatory requirements. They change defects liability periods, documentation deadlines, personnel requirements. In one recent tender, Addendum 5 changed the as-built documentation deadline from "after practical completion" to "two weeks before practical completion." That's a fundamental change to your delivery methodology. It was on page 3 of a 7-page document, issued alongside 10 other addenda.

We consistently find 4 to 7 requirements per tender that aren't in the evaluation criteria or compliance matrix. They're buried in conditions of contract, referenced standards, definitions sections, or late addenda. Miss one that's tagged as mandatory, and you're disqualified before anyone reads your methodology.

This is the problem. Not a lack of capability. A lack of visibility into what the tender actually requires.

When you send us a tender, we don't run it through a single prompt and send you the output. The report is the result of a structured pipeline with multiple stages, each with a specific job.

Stage 1: Document ingestion. We process the complete tender package. Not just the RFT. The addenda, all of them. The conditions of contract. The Statement of Requirements. The draft agreement. Q&A transcripts if they exist. Referenced standards where they're named. If there are 11 addenda and 4 schedules, we read 11 addenda and 4 schedules.

Stage 2: Addenda reconciliation. Later addenda can supersede, modify, or contradict earlier documents. We reconcile every change and flag conflicts. If Addendum 8 says SCADA information is unavailable and Addendum 11 changes the WiFi reliability assumptions that affect your SCADA design, those two things need to be read together. We make sure they are.

Stage 3: Requirements extraction. We pull every obligation from across all documents. Not just the evaluation criteria. Every "shall," "must," "required to," "expected to" across the entire package. Definitions sections. Insurance clauses. Referenced standards. Conditions of participation. Things that don't look like requirements but are.

Stage 4: Requirements matrix. This is the deliverable most clients tell us they find most useful. Every extracted requirement mapped against the evaluation criteria in a cross-reference matrix, with the source document and clause cited. It shows you exactly which requirements don't appear in the standard compliance matrix, the ones that would otherwise only surface when the evaluation panel scores your response.

Stage 5: Historical benchmarking. We match your tender against similar contracts from our database of 140,000+ contract awards. Who won similar work from this agency? At what price? What was the contract duration? What procurement method was used? This gives you market context before you commit to pricing and scope.

Stage 6: Evaluator lens. We reconstruct how a panel will score each section based on the weighting, the language in the criteria, and patterns from the issuing agency's procurement history. If the agency consistently weights methodology over price, you should know that before you allocate 60% of your response to a pricing justification.

Stage 7: Draft generation. Section-by-section exemplar text, structured to match evaluation criteria, with [INSERT] placeholders where your company-specific experience, personnel, and project references go. Every claim in the draft traces back to a requirement in the source documents. We don't invent your experience. We show you what a strong answer looks like for each criterion, and you fill in the substance.

Stage 8: Compliance verification. The final pass checks the draft against the requirements matrix. Every mandatory requirement, every evaluation criterion, every condition, verified for coverage. The output is a printable compliance checklist you can work through before you hit submit.

We track every contract award notice published on AusTender. That's 140,000+ contracts representing over $200 billion in government spending. For each contract, we know the supplier, the agency, the value, the duration, the procurement method, and the category.

We can't see the winning bids or the tender documents themselves. Those aren't public. But the award data tells you things that the tender documents can't.

It tells you who wins from this agency. Is it always the same three suppliers? Is it spread across a dozen? If 62% of similar contracts go to incumbents, that changes how you frame your risk and experience sections.

It tells you pricing context. If contracts for comparable scope range from $2 million to $7 million, you know you're pricing into a wide market. If they cluster tightly around $4 million, there's an expected price point you need to be near.

It tells you agency patterns. Some agencies run open tenders for everything. Others use panels heavily. Some have short contract cycles with frequent re-tendering. Others award long-duration contracts with extensions.

None of this is secret. It's all public data. But nobody sits there and queries it for every tender they bid on. We do, because that's literally all we do.

This is worth being direct about.

AI is good at processing large volumes of text and extracting patterns. That's genuinely useful for tenders, which are exactly that: large volumes of dense, cross-referencing text with patterns that determine how you get scored.

But general-purpose AI has a fundamental problem with procurement: it wants to be helpful. If you ask it to draft a response to an evaluation criterion and there's not enough information in the tender documents to write a good answer, it will fill in the gap with plausible-sounding content. It will reference standards that sound right but don't exist. It will describe your company's experience using details you never provided. It will cite clauses from the wrong document.

In a normal context, this is a minor annoyance. In procurement, it's a disqualification risk. An evaluator who spots a fabricated standard reference will question everything else in your submission.

So we constrain it. Here's how.

Tender-only grounding. Our analysis is grounded in the specific documents you provide. We don't pull from general training data to fill gaps. If the tender doesn't specify something, the report says so. It doesn't guess.

[INSERT] placeholders. Anywhere the response needs your company-specific information (experience, personnel, project references, pricing) the draft uses a clearly marked placeholder. We never fabricate your credentials.

Source citations. Compliance items in the requirements matrix reference the specific document, clause, and page number they come from. You can verify every item against the source.

Human review. Every report is reviewed by someone who understands Commonwealth procurement before it reaches you. The AI does the heavy processing. A person makes sure it's right.

No company data processing. We don't ask for or process your company information, past proposals, or internal documents. You send us the tender package, we return the analysis. Your IP stays yours. We don't store it, train on it, or share it.

The reason we only do tenders, and nothing else, is because constraining AI to a specific domain with specific documents and verifiable outputs is what makes it accurate. The moment you ask it to do everything, it becomes unreliable for anything that matters.

A Bid Accelerator report has four parts:

Part 1: Requirements Matrix. Every obligation from across the tender package, mapped against evaluation criteria, with source references and risk ratings. This is your master checklist, the document that tells you what the tender actually requires, not just what it appears to require.

Part 2: Exemplar Response Text. Section-by-section drafts structured to match how evaluators score. With [INSERT] placeholders for your details and [SUGGESTED] markers for our recommendations. This isn't a finished bid. It's a starting point that saves you the hardest part: figuring out the structure and knowing what each section needs to cover.

Part 3: Compliance Checklist. A printable pre-submission verification list. Gate requirements that would disqualify you if missed. Mandatory documents. Content checklist for each attachment. Work through it before you submit.

Part 4: Critical Intelligence. Hidden requirements, landmines, addenda changes, agency procurement patterns, and historical benchmarks. The context that helps you make better decisions about how to bid, or whether to bid at all.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, we have a full sample report for a $50 million remote infrastructure tender. It's the real thing: requirements matrix, exemplar text, compliance checklist, the lot.

The Bid Accelerator works best for companies that are capable but time-constrained. You can win the work. You have the experience, the team, the track record. But you're spending three weeks decoding a tender that could have been analysed in 48 hours.

It's especially useful if you don't have a dedicated bid team. If the person writing your tender response is also the person running your projects, they don't have time to read 11 addenda, cross-reference the conditions of contract against the evaluation criteria, and figure out what the agency's historical award patterns look like. That's what we do.

It's not a replacement for actually knowing your business. The exemplar text gives you the structure and shows you what a strong answer looks like, but you still need to fill in the substance. Your experience, your team, your methodology. The report starts the bid. You finish it.

And it's not going to help if the tender isn't a good fit. Sometimes the most useful thing in the report is the historical benchmarking that shows you the agency has awarded 80% of similar contracts to the incumbent at prices below your cost base. That's a bid/no-bid decision, not a bid writing problem.

Government procurement in Australia is $70 billion a year. The process is designed to be fair and transparent, and for the most part it is. But there's a massive information asymmetry between the agencies that write tenders and the businesses that respond to them.

Large primes have bid teams that do this full-time. They have libraries of past responses, established relationships with evaluation panels, and the resources to decode complex procurement documents across multiple addenda. That's not a capability advantage. It's an information advantage.

Smaller suppliers, often more capable, more agile, and better value for money, lose because they don't have that infrastructure. They read the RFT and the first couple of addenda. They miss the requirement on page 47 that changed between Addendum 5 and Addendum 11. They structure their response based on what seems logical rather than what the evaluation criteria actually weight.

BidScout exists to close that gap. We combine real procurement experience with AI to deliver the analysis that used to require a bid manager with 20 years of Canberra connections. Not the writing, the analysis. The requirements mapping, the compliance verification, the historical context, the evaluator perspective.

You bring the capability. We make sure the evaluators can see it.