Clarido reads an RFP, turns it into a structured proposal, and leans on what your firm has already delivered. This guide covers the first four things to do, in the order they pay off.
Before you start
You need an account and a confirmed email address. Until you confirm it, some actions stay blocked and a banner at the top of the app offers Resend link.
Have a real RFP ready too. Clarido accepts PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text and markdown, up to 50 MB per file.
1. Fill in the firm profile
Open My Content, then Firm profile. This is where you describe your firm once and for all: Firm Description, Firm Vitals, Sectors & Expertise, Regions & Languages, Certifications & Accreditations, Distinctive Approaches & Commitments and Tone & Writing Style.
Clarido draws on this every time it drafts, which makes it the deposit that pays back fastest.
2. Fill your library
The home screen carries a Your library section with its counter, "0 of 3 in place" at the start. Three deposits sit there: Past projects, Team and Firm profile. Each row names what is missing and links to the page that fills it. Three more categories, useful later, unfold at the bottom of the section: Methodological capital, Clients and Tables of contents.
Start with the engagements you have already delivered, under Past projects, and with your team's resumes, under Team. If you have an older service proposal on hand, the Past proposals page imports it as Word or PDF, then lets you pick what lands in your library. Everything also lives under My Content, the hub for all your deposits.
3. Start a proposal
From the home screen, Start a new project. Drop the RFP as you received it, up to 20 files at once, or use or paste text when the solicitation only exists inside an email. Pasted text has to look like an RFP; otherwise Clarido asks you to paste a longer part or to drop the file.
The list says what Clarido thinks each file is. It proposes the main document, spots the RFP's rules and its addenda, and sets aside your firm's own files or the other-language version of a document. If the proposed main document is not the right one, Not the right one? lets you pick another. That choice matters, because it no longer changes once the proposal is created. Remove takes a file off the list.
Each file moves from Reading… to Ready. If one stays Unreadable, a password-protected PDF for instance, Try reading again re-runs the read without asking for the file again. When Clarido takes a file for internal notes, it says so. Beside a client document, those notes serve as context and give none of the RFP's requirements, and Read it as an RFP corrects that reading. Deposited alone, they become the source of the needs and requirements, as pasted notes do. An oversized document is flagged here, while the file is still in your hands. The Working language is the one Clarido will write the whole proposal in. It comes from the RFP, else from another client document, your notes or, as a last resort, your interface, and the screen says which. Change it before Start analysis, because changing it later rewrites nothing already produced. The Table of contents template picks the outline the proposal will follow.
Then Start analysis. The proposal is created and opens on Admissibility. Its name, its client and its output format all stay editable in the workspace. The files you dropped land in the Documents tab, sorted into groups such as Read by Clarido or Set aside, and Include in the analysis there has Clarido read a file it had left aside.
4. Follow the proposal thread
At the top of the proposal, the thread shows the four phases of the work (Understand, Decide, Produce, Submit) and the seven steps inside them: Admissibility, Analysis, Positioning, Decision, The plan, The draft, Review. If the plan or the draft starts before a decision is recorded, hovering the Decision step says so ("not recorded").
A step is marked done only once it has recorded something. Walking past it does not tick it. Review stays neutral while it still reports a gap or a problem. At the bottom of every screen, Next step takes you onward. Requirements and Documents stay reachable throughout, since you come back to them at any point in the work.
What comes next
Nothing is lost if you stop along the way, so pick the proposal back up where you left it. When it is ready, Export produces the service proposal.
Every screen in the flow has its own help page. The "?" in the top bar opens the one for the screen you are on. The most common questions are gathered in the FAQ.
Checked against the app on October 17, 2026