Every tender document you read makes you better. But most tender teams only read the specifications for the contract they’re bidding on — and start from scratch every time. That’s like taking an exam without looking at past papers.

The power of historical tender documents is systematically underestimated. Those who systematically analyze previous specifications write faster, price more sharply, and make better GO/NO-GO decisions. This article explains how.

Why Historical Tender Documents Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

Contracting Authorities Repeat Themselves

Government bodies don’t write every specification from scratch. They reuse templates, copy clauses, and follow fixed patterns. A municipality that wrote a specification for grounds maintenance three years ago will largely use the same structure, the same selection criteria, and similar award criteria in the next cycle.

This offers a huge advantage for anyone who has read the previous version. You know before you start writing which requirements are coming, what the weighting looks like, and which documents you need to prepare. While your competitor opens the specification for the first time and has to figure everything out, you’re already working on your approach.

Pricing Becomes Predictable

One of the most difficult parts of a submission is price determination. Too high and you lose on price. Too low and you sacrifice margin — or worse, you arouse suspicion from the evaluator.

Historical tender documents give you two crucial data points. First, the contracting authority’s estimate, which is sometimes explicitly stated in the specifications or can be derived from the chosen procedure (below or above the European threshold). Second, the award amounts from previous, comparable contracts, allowing you to triangulate the market price.

An IT company bidding on a software project for a provincial government can use previous specifications from that same government to determine what daily rates were typical, how many hours were typically estimated, and whether there was room for change requests. With that knowledge, you’re not pricing blind — you’re pricing informed.

Selection Criteria Are No Longer a Surprise

Every specification contains selection criteria: the minimum requirements you must meet to even be considered. Think of turnover requirements, references, certifications, and personnel capacity.

By analyzing the specifications from the past two to three years for a specific contracting authority or sector, you see patterns. Does this authority always require ISO 9001? Do they demand three references of at least the same size? Do they apply a minimum turnover threshold of 1.5× the contract value?

That knowledge determines your GO/NO-GO decision. If you know that an authority structurally requires VCA** and you only have VCA*, you can address that requirement in advance — or decide not to bid and spend your time on more promising opportunities.

Four Concrete Applications

1. Mapping the Contracting Authority

Every contracting authority has a style. Some write tight specifications with little room for interpretation. Others deliberately leave freedom in the elaboration and reward creativity in the approach. Still others focus heavily on price and use the quality assessment primarily as a minimum threshold.

By reading three to five previous specifications from the same authority, you get a profile:

How does this authority weigh price versus quality? For some authorities, the ratio is consistently 40/60, for others 60/40. If you know this in advance, you can align your strategy before the new specification even appears.

What language and structure does the authority expect? Some services want a tightly structured approach with fixed chapter divisions. Others appreciate a narrative approach. The previous specification tells you exactly which form works best.

How strictly does the authority evaluate? From the answers in the clarification notes of previous contracts, you can deduce how rigid the authority is. Are questions answered flexibly? Are requirements adjusted after objection? Or does the service rigidly adhere to the original formulation?

2. Strengthening Your Tender Templates

Experienced tender teams work with templates: standard texts for project organization, quality assurance, risk management, and communication. The difference between a mediocre and an excellent template lies in how well it’s tailored to what contracting authorities actually ask for.

By analyzing dozens of specifications, you discover which themes structurally recur in your sector. In construction, these are safety, planning, environmental impact, and sustainability. In IT, it’s project methodology, information security, change management, and SLAs.

With that knowledge, you build a library of answers that you fine-tune per tender — instead of reinventing the wheel each time. This not only saves time but also improves quality: your answers get better because they’re based on what’s actually being asked.

3. Building Market Intelligence

Specifications contain more information than most bidders realize. From a specification, you can deduce which direction a contracting authority is heading. Is there suddenly a requirement for cloud-native architecture while previous contracts were on-premise? Then a digitalization strategy is underway. Are new requirements around CO₂ reporting appearing? Then the authority is preparing for the sustainability requirements coming from Europe in 2026-2027.

Spotting these trends gives you a strategic advantage. You can invest in certifications and competencies that you know will be requested in a year. You can build partnerships with parties that have complementary expertise. And you can adjust your positioning on emerging themes.

4. Assessing the Competition

In open tenders, award decisions are published: who won, for what amount, and with what score. By combining this data with the specifications and clarification notes, you build a picture of your competitive field.

Which companies regularly bid at the same authorities as you? What are their price levels? On which criteria do they score well or poorly? After a year of systematic tracking, you have a competitive dossier that no sales pitch can give you — because it’s based on actual award data.

Where to Find Historical Tender Documents

Tender documents are in principle public documents, but they’re not always easy to find. The main sources:

e-Procurement (Belgium). The central platform for Belgian public contracts. Specifications for active contracts are downloadable after registration. After the procedure ends, however, documents are not always preserved or kept accessible.

TED (European). Tenders Electronic Daily publishes announcements and award notices for contracts above the European threshold. The specifications themselves are not on there — for those, you need to go to the national platform.

Your own archive. The most valuable source is your own archive. Every specification you’ve ever downloaded, every clarification note you’ve read, every award decision you’ve received — save it systematically. After two years, you have a dataset worth more than any external source.

TenderWolf. TenderWolf is building a searchable tender document database that makes historical specifications and associated documents searchable. You can search by keywords, CPV codes, contracting authority, and time period. This way, you find comparable contracts in seconds that you would never find manually.

Practical: Setting Up a System

Analyzing historical tender documents only yields real returns if you do it systematically. A simple but effective system:

Step 1: Define your scope. Select the three to five contracting authorities most relevant to your business, plus the two to three CPV categories that cover your core activity. Don’t start too broad.

Step 2: Collect. Download the specifications, clarification notes, and award decisions from the past two to three years for your selected scope. Save them in a structured folder structure per authority and per year.

Step 3: Analyze the patterns. For each authority, look at the selection and award criteria, the weighting of price versus quality, the required references and certifications, and the price level of the awards. Note what consistently recurs.

Step 4: Build your knowledge cards. Create a summary profile for each authority: their standard requirements, their style, their price level, their evaluator behavior. This becomes your “cheat sheet” for every new contract from that authority.

Step 5: Track and update. Add every new specification and award decision to your archive. Trends change — authorities adjust their requirements, price levels shift, new themes emerge. Your knowledge cards are only valuable if they’re current.

The Difference in Practice

The difference between a tender team that analyzes historical tender documents and one that doesn’t is comparable to the difference between a student who practices past exams and one who only reads the textbook. Both are prepared, but one knows exactly what’s coming.

More concrete bids, sharper prices, faster decisions, and less time wasted on hopeless submissions. It’s not spectacular innovation — it’s discipline. And it works.

Get Started with TenderWolf

With the TenderWolf tender document database, you can search historical specifications by keyword, sector, and contracting authority. Combine that with AI quick-scan for fast content analysis and market insights for competitive intelligence.

Start free with TenderWolf and build your knowledge advantage.

Analyzing Tender Documents Like a Pro: How to Use Historical Data