Shipped: multi-doc RFP ingest with attachment dependencies
RFPs ship as bundles. The scoring rubric, the technical appendix, the pricing workbook. The Analyzer now ingests all of them as one pursuit, with dependencies tracked between them.
Multi-document RFP ingest shipped this week to all customers on the RFP Analyzer. Here’s what changed and why.
What it does
A real RFP rarely arrives as a single PDF. It arrives as a bundle: the main solicitation document, a scoring rubric, a technical appendix, a pricing workbook, sometimes an addendum or two posted after the original. Until this release, the Analyzer ingested one document per pursuit and treated additional files as separate uploads with no dependency awareness between them.
That’s now fixed. A pursuit is a set of documents. The Analyzer ingests them together, fingerprints each one, and tracks the dependencies between them.
The kinds of dependency we track on ingest:
- Reference dependencies. The main RFP says “see Attachment B for the technical appendix.” The Analyzer maps the reference to Attachment B and surfaces the link in the requirements view.
- Scoring dependencies. The scoring rubric document defines the criteria the response is graded against. Requirements extracted from the main RFP get linked to the rubric criteria automatically where the language matches.
- Pricing dependencies. The pricing workbook (typically Excel) defines line items the response must price. Each line item becomes a structured requirement in the compliance matrix, with a pointer to the workbook cell.
- Addendum dependencies. Addenda are ingested as updates to the original document set. The Analyzer diffs the addendum against the prior version and surfaces only the changed requirements.
Why this matters
The number-one cause of compliance failure on intake, by a wide margin, is missing an attachment. A team responds to the main RFP and discovers, three weeks later, that the buyer’s evaluation framework was an attached Word doc nobody opened. The Analyzer’s job from intake forward is to make that failure structurally impossible: every uploaded artifact is in scope, every cross-reference is resolved, every piece of evaluation language ends up in the compliance matrix.
The pricing workbook integration is the part we’re proudest of. Most RFP tools treat the pricing workbook as an attached spreadsheet — a file you have to open separately, fill in by hand, and re-upload. The Analyzer reads the workbook on ingest, extracts the pricing structure, and turns the line items into structured requirements that show up in the same compliance view as the prose requirements. A pricing reviewer and a compliance reviewer now see the same artifact.
What ships in this release
- Bundled upload — drag a folder, drop a zip, paste a portal link with multiple downloadable artifacts.
- Per-document fingerprint and version tracking.
- Cross-document reference resolution (English-language references like “see Section 4.2 of the technical appendix”).
- Excel pricing workbook structural extraction.
- Addendum diffing against the prior version of the document set.
- A unified compliance matrix that spans all documents in the pursuit.
What doesn’t ship yet
Three things on the next-quarter list:
- Portal-driven ingest. Some RFPs live behind portals (SAM.gov, state-level eProcurement systems, large enterprise vendor portals). The Analyzer accepts uploads and links to public-facing PDFs; portal scraping is a separate workstream.
- Complex pricing workbooks. Workbooks with formulas that depend on other workbooks, or workbooks with embedded macros, will still require manual review on the structural extraction. We extract what we can and surface a confidence score per workbook.
- Image-only attachments. A scanned-PDF attachment that’s image-only goes through OCR; the OCR confidence is surfaced alongside the extracted text. Buyers occasionally include image-only contractual exhibits that nobody can answer until OCR runs cleanly. We flag low-confidence pages explicitly.
Try it
Upload a real RFP bundle to the Analyzer. The first three pursuits per account remain free.