Guide · Results & appeals

Analysing a procurement decision – a bidder's guide to reading the decision documents

Once a tender has been decided, the contracting authority sends every participant a written procurement decision. For a professional bidder the decision is not merely an announcement of the winner but a legal document and a data source that guides future sales strategy and reveals any need to use legal remedies.

Updated 7 July 2026 · Tendera

The Procurement Act (section 114) requires the contracting authority to give reasons for its decision. A bidder must be able to read the decision documents systematically to make sure the procedure was lawful and the comparison was carried out according to the criteria announced.

1. The statutory content of a procurement decision

Under the law, the procurement decision or its annexes must clearly state the factors that materially affected the outcome. The first thing to check when reading a decision is that the document contains the following mandatory information:

The name of the winning bidder: Who was chosen as the contracting party or parties.
The grounds for the choice: How the winning bid met the award criteria and why it was assessed as the most economically advantageous.
The grounds for rejection: If your own or a competitor's bid was rejected (for not conforming to the tender documents, for example), the decision must state the reason for the rejection in detail.

If the decision is inadequately reasoned — for example, if the quality scoring is justified only with vague phrases such as "the winner's bid was the most competent" without concrete differences between the bids — the contracting authority has breached its duty to give reasons.

2. Unpacking the comparison table mathematically

The most important annex to a procurement decision is usually the comparison table showing the price and quality points each bid received. Two situations must be distinguished when reading it:

Rejection of a bid: If a bid was rejected, it is not included in the comparison table. Attention must then focus solely on the lawfulness of the rejection: was the bid really non-conforming, or has the contracting authority interpreted its own requirements incorrectly?
Losing the comparison: If the bid was accepted into the comparison, the table shows which areas decided the tender. Calculate whether maximum quality points would have beaten the competitor's price, or how much the price would have had to fall at your current quality points. This analysis reveals whether your pricing model is in line with the market and whether the contracting authority understood your bid's qualitative advantages the way the scoring matrix intended.

3. A party's right of access and requesting documents

Receiving the procurement decision is only the first step. Understanding the quality criteria often requires seeing the winning bid.

As a company that took part in the tender, the Act on the Openness of Government Activities (section 11) gives you a party's right of access to information. You have the right to ask the contracting authority to see the winning bid to the extent that it affected the comparison. Even if the winner has marked its entire bid as a trade secret, the authority cannot withhold from a party the information that shaped the quality points. Requesting the documents is a routine step that every professional bidder should use to learn from competitors' solutions and to verify that the comparison was objective.

4. The standstill period and instructions for appeal (section 129)

Every procurement decision must be accompanied by rectification instructions and an appeal notice. These set the legal time limits within which a bidder must react if it detects an error in the procedure.

Standstill period: In procurements above the EU threshold and in national procurements, the decision is followed by a mandatory standstill period (typically 14 days). The contract cannot be signed during that time.
Time limits: The window for reacting starts when you are notified of the decision (in electronic systems often the day the decision was sent). If the standstill period runs out and none of the bidders seeks a remedy, the contracting authority can lock in the contract with the winner, after which challenging the procedure becomes considerably harder.

Frequently asked questions

What must a procurement decision state by law?

The factors that materially affected the outcome (section 114): the name of the winning bidder, the grounds for the choice by award criterion and detailed reasons for any rejections.

When is the reasoning in a procurement decision inadequate?

When the quality scoring, for example, is justified only with vague phrases and no concrete differences between the bids. The contracting authority has then breached its duty to give reasons.

How should the comparison table be analysed?

Calculate whether maximum quality points would have beaten the competitor's price — or how much the price would have had to fall at your current quality points. The result guides both the decision on legal remedies and the strategy for your next bid.