Questions, answered.

Tender management is the end-to-end process of identifying, preparing, and submitting bids in response to procurement opportunities. It covers everything from analyzing the tender notice and gathering compliance documents to writing technical responses and pricing schedules. Effective tender management ensures every submission is complete, compliant, and competitive — which directly affects win rates. Most SMEs handle this manually with spreadsheets and email, but dedicated tooling can cut preparation time by 60–80%.

The biggest time sinks in tender response are document gathering, requirement extraction, and writing from scratch. You can dramatically speed up each stage: maintain a pre-organized vault of reusable documents (certificates, CVs, past project summaries), use software that auto-extracts requirements from the RFP so you don't read 200 pages manually, and leverage AI-assisted drafting to generate first-pass responses grounded in the actual tender. Teams using Tendor typically go from days of preparation to a few hours per submission.

Requirements vary by tender, but most public and private sector bids ask for: company registration documents, tax clearance certificates, relevant professional certifications, audited financial statements, proof of experience (past project references), CVs of key personnel, and a compliance declaration. Many tenders also require a technical proposal and a separate pricing schedule. The safest approach is to extract the exact document checklist from the RFP itself — Tendor does this automatically so nothing gets missed.

A tender is a formal invitation for suppliers to submit bids, typically with strict formatting and compliance rules. An RFP (Request for Proposal) is a procurement document that asks vendors to propose a solution — it usually allows more flexibility in how you structure your response. In practice, the terms are often used interchangeably. The key difference is that tenders tend to be more rigid and evaluation-criteria-driven, while RFPs invite creative problem-solving. Tendor handles both formats equally well.

When you upload a tender document (PDF, DOCX, or XLSX), Tendor parses the full text and uses AI to identify every requirement — mandatory submissions, technical criteria, compliance clauses, and evaluation weightings. These are categorized by type and priority, then surfaced as an interactive checklist. This means you can see at a glance what the tender demands without reading the entire document end-to-end. The extraction is grounded in the actual document text, so you can always trace a requirement back to its source paragraph.

Yes — and you should. Most tenders ask for the same core documents: company registration, tax certificates, BEE/BBBEE certificates, professional accreditations, and key personnel CVs. Tendor's Document Vault lets you upload these once and automatically matches them to the requirements of each new tender. Documents with expiry dates are tracked so you get notified before a certificate lapses. This alone saves hours per submission and eliminates the risk of submitting expired documents.

Tendor accepts PDF, DOCX, and XLSX uploads for tender documents. For form filling, you can upload XLSX and DOCX templates — these become interactive web forms that export back to the original format. Price schedules support XLSX input and output. AI-generated responses can be exported as DOCX or PDF. The goal is to work with the formats procurement teams actually use, so you never need to convert files manually before uploading or submitting.

After Tendor extracts the requirements from your RFP, each item is tracked against your submission progress. Mandatory document requirements are matched against your Document Vault. Technical criteria are flagged as addressed or outstanding based on your response content. The compliance dashboard gives you a single view of what's done, what's missing, and what's at risk — so you can prioritize effort on the gaps that would cause disqualification rather than polishing sections that are already strong.

Tendor was built specifically for SMEs, independent consultants, and agencies — the teams that don't have a dedicated bid desk or proposal writers. The free plan gives you 3 tenders per month with full access to RFP analysis, document checklists, compliance tracking, and AI response generation. There's no minimum team size and no enterprise sales process. You sign up, upload your first RFP, and start working on your response immediately.

Tendor has three plans: Free (3 tenders/month), Pro at $29/month (25 tenders/month, Document Vault, form filling, price schedules), and Business at $79/month (unlimited tenders and generations, priority support). All plans include RFP analysis, compliance tracking, and AI response generation. There's no credit card required to start and no long-term contracts. You can see the full breakdown on the pricing page.