Extract data from commercial bids and tenders

A commercial bid is a supplier's priced answer to a tender, and a procurement team reads dozens of them side by side to award the work. Where a request for proposal (RFP) or a request for quotation (RFQ) is the buyer asking, the bid is the supplier answering: this is what we will do, for this price, by this date, under these terms. A tender evaluation committee, a procurement analyst, and a contracts lawyer all read the same structure to compare bids fairly, the bidder and its contact, the scope of work, the total price with its tax, the priced line items, the delivery milestones, the validity period the price is held for, and the certifications and commercial clauses that decide whether a bid is even compliant. On a public tender in the European Union that structure is fixed by the tender documents; on a private one it is whatever the bidder submits. The difficulty is comparing like with like when every bidder formats differently. One bidder prices per line item, another gives a cost breakdown by labor, materials, and overhead, and a third bundles everything into a single figure, so the evaluation has to reconstruct a comparable price from whatever the bid provides. A validity period of 90 days fixes how long the quoted price stands, a milestone schedule ties payment to delivery dates, and the certifications listed, an ISO 9001 registration, an insurance level, decide compliance before price is even considered. Commercial clauses such as a liability cap, a termination-for-convenience right, and a minimum commitment sit in the terms and change the risk each bid carries. Talonic reads the commercial bid and returns the bidder and buyer, the scope, the priced line items and any cost breakdown, the delivery milestones, the validity period, and the certifications and commercial clauses as structured fields. A bid from Baumann Fertigung GmbH submitted by the 2026-04-15 deadline, quoting 480,000 EUR plus 91,200 EUR of VAT for a scope of work with three payment milestones running to 2026-12-15 and a 90-day validity, loads into an evaluation system as comparable fields, so a committee scores bids from structured data rather than paging through each submission. Talonic structures what each bid states and does not rank or score the bids.

What gets extracted from commercial bids and tenders

How extraction works for commercial bids and tenders

Commercial bids arrive as supplier PDFs, e-procurement portal exports, and scanned tender responses, and because every bidder answers a tender in its own format, the pricing granularity and the clause placement differ on each one. Talonic classifies the bid and maps it to the contract schema in the Field Registry, which separates the bid header from the priced line items, the cost breakdown, and the delivery-milestone schedule. The bidder and buyer with their contacts, the scope of work, the submission deadline, the total and tax, and the validity period are captured as header fields, the line items return as an array with unit prices and totals in one currency, and the cost breakdown by labor, materials, and overhead is kept as its own table. Certifications and compliance requirements are captured as a list, and the commercial clauses, cap on liability, termination for convenience, minimum commitment, insurance, and anti-assignment, are returned with the text that establishes them. Every value returns with a confidence score and a pixel-region pointer under DIN SPEC 91491, so an evaluator can verify a quoted price or a certification against the source bid. Talonic structures what each bid states and does not rank the bids or judge which should win.

Sample extraction

A commercial bid responding to a public tender

{
  "document_number": "BID-2026-0339",
  "document_date": "2026-04-10",
  "submission_deadline": "2026-04-15",
  "bidder.name": "Baumann Fertigung GmbH",
  "bidder.contact_email": "tender@baumann-fertigung.de",
  "buyer.name": "Stadtwerke Muenchen",
  "scope_of_work": "Supply and install 12 medium-voltage substation transformers",
  "currency": "EUR",
  "total_amount": 480000,
  "tax_amount": 91200,
  "validity_period": "90 days",
  "governing_law": "Germany",
  "certifications_compliance": [
    "ISO 9001:2015",
    "EUR 5,000,000 liability insurance"
  ],
  "line_items": [
    {
      "line_item_number": "1",
      "description": "Medium-voltage transformer, 630 kVA",
      "quantity": 12,
      "unit_of_measure": "pcs",
      "unit_price": 32000,
      "line_total": 384000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    },
    {
      "line_item_number": "2",
      "description": "Installation and commissioning",
      "quantity": 1,
      "unit_of_measure": "lot",
      "unit_price": 96000,
      "line_total": 96000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    }
  ],
  "delivery_schedule": [
    {
      "milestone_number": "1",
      "description": "Delivery of transformers",
      "delivery_date": "2026-09-30",
      "payment_amount": 240000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    },
    {
      "milestone_number": "2",
      "description": "Installation complete",
      "delivery_date": "2026-11-30",
      "payment_amount": 144000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    },
    {
      "milestone_number": "3",
      "description": "Commissioning and acceptance",
      "delivery_date": "2026-12-15",
      "payment_amount": 96000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    }
  ]
}

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