How BidClarity Works
Every opportunity in your BidClarity report carries a 0–100 match score. It is the first number your eye lands on when you open your report, and it is designed to answer a single question: is this contract worth my team's time?
Understanding what the score represents — and what drives it — helps you make faster, more confident bid decisions and get more out of every report you receive.
The match score is not a keyword overlap percentage. It is not how often your business name appears in the contract notice. It is not a measure of how competitive the opportunity is or what your chances of winning are.
It is a structured assessment of whether a specific contract — its scope, requirements, geographic location, set-aside eligibility, and market context — is genuinely aligned with what your business does and is qualified to pursue. Two businesses with identical scores on the same contract may be there for entirely different reasons. The score is personal to your profile.
BidClarity evaluates each opportunity across multiple dimensions, applied in order of specificity from your most critical capability match to supporting opportunity signals:
Capability alignment is the primary driver. It measures how closely the contract's required deliverables match your declared products and services — at the meaning level, not the keyword level. A contract for "managed network services" can match a profile that says "network equipment resale and installation" even if those exact words don't appear in the notice.
Commodity code match evaluates whether the NAICS business category code (North American Industry Classification System, used in US and Canada federal procurement), GSIN code (Canada's Goods and Services Identification Number), UNSPSC code (the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code, used across UN agencies and multilateral banks), or CPV code (Common Procurement Vocabulary, the EU's 9-digit commodity classification) assigned to the contract aligns with your registered codes. An exact 6-digit NAICS match contributes more than a match at the broader industry group level.
Eligibility and market fit checks whether you are eligible to bid based on your registered market, geographic scope, and certifications. A contract set aside for Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) firms that you are not certified for will score lower on this dimension regardless of how strong the capability match is — because eligibility is a prerequisite for bidding, not just a preference.
Opportunity quality signals reflect the practical viability of pursuing the contract: the contract value relative to your business size, the remaining time before the deadline, and the issuing agency's historical award patterns in your commodity area.
Two subscribers reviewing the same contract notice see completely different scores because BidClarity evaluates every notice against each subscriber's individual profile independently. A medical supply company and an IT hardware reseller will receive entirely different scores on the same federal contract — and both scores are correct for their respective businesses.
Strong alignment across capability, eligibility, and opportunity quality. Download the full solicitation, allocate proposal resources, and complete the 5-step action plan included in your report. For HIGH matches with deadlines under 14 days, treat as urgent regardless of your report cadence.
Partial match — one or more dimensions below threshold. The most common reasons: scope language is ambiguous and may clarify in an amendment; the contract is in an adjacent capability area where you could team with a prime; or the deadline is tight enough to reduce opportunity quality despite strong capability alignment. Check the gap analysis in your report to understand exactly what is holding the score down.
These are filtered from your main report to keep it actionable. Access the full unfiltered list from your subscriber portal at any time. SKIP contracts are useful for competitive intelligence — tracking what agencies in your market are buying, even when the specific contract is not for you.
Every scored opportunity in your report includes two sections alongside the score number:
Why you match — the specific capabilities, codes, and eligibility factors that drove a HIGH or WATCH score. This tells you which parts of your profile are doing the work. If a contract scores HIGH because of strong NAICS alignment but weak capability match, the match reasons will show that — and you can decide whether to pursue knowing the capability fit is less certain than the code fit.
Capability gaps — the specific requirements the contract demands that your profile does not explicitly cover. This is often the most valuable section of a WATCH result. If the gap identifies a requirement you can genuinely deliver but forgot to include in your profile, update your profile at your subscriber portal. If the gap is a genuine capability constraint, use it as a concrete bid/no-bid factor rather than a vague feeling about fit.
Your capability profile is the primary input to every score in every report. The specificity of your profile description directly determines how accurately BidClarity can assess fit. Here is what the difference looks like in practice:
| Profile description | Score quality | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| "IT services and technology solutions" | Low precision | Moderate scores across a wide range of IT contracts — genuine matches and non-matches both score similarly. High noise, unclear priorities. |
| "Network equipment resale and installation — Cisco Catalyst switches, HP Aruba wireless, Fortinet firewalls. Government and education sector. Authorised reseller. NAICS 423430, 541512." | High precision | HIGH scores on genuinely relevant contracts (federal IT equipment procurement, government network refresh). SKIP scores on adjacent contracts you cannot deliver. Clear priorities, low noise. |
The specific profile produces better scores in both directions — higher where you genuinely match, lower where you don't. This is what makes your report actionable rather than just informative.
Use product and service names, not categories. "Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switches, HPE ProLiant servers, Dell EMC storage" scores better than "enterprise networking equipment." Government solicitations often name specific brands or technical standards — specific product names allow BidClarity to match solicitations that would otherwise score lower on keyword alignment.
Name your customer sectors explicitly. Government procurement language differs significantly by sector. Healthcare procurement uses different terminology than defence or education procurement, even for the same products. If you supply to federal health agencies, say "VA, HHS, Public Health Agency of Canada." If you supply defence, say "DoD, Army, Air Force, DND."
Include your certifications and registrations. Stating "SAM.gov active, NAICS 423430, 8(a) certified, ISO 9001:2015" or "CanadaBuys registered, GSIN N7010, ProServices qualified" allows BidClarity to correctly score set-aside and pre-qualified opportunities that require these designations.
Define what you do not deliver. "No custom software development — hardware resale and deployment only" prevents false positives on software development contracts. Negative definitions improve SKIP accuracy, which reduces noise in your reports and makes HIGH matches stand out more clearly.
Include geographic constraints. "Serves US federal and Canadian federal clients — no field delivery to international sites" tells BidClarity to weight international contracts lower for your profile. This prevents UNGM and World Bank opportunities from scoring HIGH when you have no international delivery capability.
The financing assessment appears alongside — not inside — your match score. It does not affect the 0–100 number. It is a parallel evaluation of whether financing programmes may be available to help you pursue and execute the contract.
For each HIGH match, your report flags relevant programmes based on the contract's geography, value, structure, and your market. A US federal set-aside contract may trigger an SBA financing flag. An international development bank contract may trigger an EDC or EXIM flag. A contract with net-60 payment terms may trigger a working capital flag. These flags appear before you open the solicitation — so you know the financing landscape before you invest proposal effort.
Your BidClarity score answers: should you bid? The buyer's evaluation score — LPTA (Lowest Price Technically Acceptable, used in US federal procurement), best value tradeoff, or QCBS (Quality and Cost-Based Selection, used in World Bank and multilateral bank consulting) — answers: did you win? These are different questions at different stages.
A contract scoring 88 on BidClarity means strong alignment between the opportunity and your capability. It does not predict your win probability — that depends on your proposal quality, price competitiveness, past performance, and who else bids. The match score is a pursuit decision input, not a win guarantee.
Where the two scores connect: a contract you score 35 on BidClarity identifies the same gaps that a buyer's evaluation committee would identify in your proposal. Pursuing low-scored contracts wastes proposal investment and produces losses that are fully predictable before you start writing.
Your match score is the start of the loop, not the end. When a HIGH-scored contract becomes a win, the same intelligence engine hands off to BidClarity Fulfill — which tracks every deliverable milestone, manages supplier outreach, and auto-drafts your past performance narrative at closeout. That documented performance record feeds directly back into your next BidClarity report: better past performance data means more accurate scoring on future opportunities. The loop compounds. Every competitor stops at the bid decision. BidClarity runs the full cycle.
Your first BidClarity report delivers a 0–100 match score for every opportunity in your market — with match reasons, capability gaps, financing flags, and a 5-step action plan per HIGH match. Delivered within 60 minutes of completing your profile across 37+ global portals.
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