Finding tenders & setting up alerts

Every tender on the platform comes from official UK and European public-sector procurement sources — spanning central government, the NHS, the devolved nations, councils and (for exporters) European markets. We pull these three times a day, deduplicate, normalise the schema and load them into a single searchable index.

When you're signed in, the box at the top of Tenders lets you just describe what you want — e.g. "cleaning contracts in Wales under £10k closing soon, SME-friendly". We read your request, turn it into the structured filters below, and show the matching tenders.

The results are real notices found by the normal search — the AI only interprets your wording, it doesn't invent tenders. A banner above the results shows how it read your request, and every filter it set is visible in the panel so you can tweak anything. The page URL captures the filters too, so you can bookmark or share the search.

Searching in English across Europe. European notices are matched on their English title and category label, so searching in plain English works across all EU countries — a Czech school-catering notice is found by "school catering" without translating anything. What this does not reach is wording that appears only in the local-language description, such as a product name, a brand or a specialist technology. If you are looking for something niche, search the category rather than the term, or use the CPV category picker, which is the same in every language.

Each smart search uses one AI call from your workspace's monthly search allowance. Not signed in, or prefer to be precise? Use the structured filters below — they do everything the smart search does.

Most suppliers only find a contract once the tender is live — by then the buyer's requirement is fixed and everyone's competing on the same terms. Upcoming opportunities surfaces the pre-tender signals: notices where a buyer has flagged a procurement they plan to run, often months before it opens for bids.

This matters more than ever. Since the Procurement Act 2023, pre-tender notices are published at record levels — buyers now issue almost as many pipeline, prior-information and market-engagement notices as actual tenders. Engaging at this stage lets you introduce your company, understand the buyer's priorities, and even help shape the requirement and evaluation criteria before the competition has noticed the opportunity exists.

Filter the pipeline by sector, region, value, market theme or notice type — then reach out to the buyer's contact early. The suppliers who win are usually the ones who were talking to the buyer long before the tender went live.

• →Frameworks you can join — the live framework and DPS registers of nine buying organisations (Crown Commercial Service, NHS Shared Business Services, NEPO, Procurement for Housing, ESPO, Scotland Excel, Fusion21, TUCO and Procure Partnerships), down to the individual lots on each agreement — so an agreement covering rail freight is findable by searching for rail freight, not only by its own name. Getting onto the right agreement puts you in front of buyers without competing for every notice; DPS, Dynamic Markets and Open Frameworks accept new suppliers at any time. Filter by category and “open to join now”, and write a company profile to be shown the lots that match what you do, and switch on alerts if you want to be told when new ones appear.
• →Re-procurement radar — UK contracts nearing the end of their term. Spot an incumbent's contract before it's re-tendered, engage the buyer, and get ahead of the renewal. Filter by expiry window, sector and value.

Open Tenders and you'll see a filter row across the top. Every field is optional — combine as many as you need.

Keyword

Free-text match against title, buyer name and reference number. Use for specifics ("Microsoft 365 migration", reference numbers) rather than broad themes — CPV is better for those.

Procurement category (CPV) Most useful

The EU's hierarchical taxonomy of what's being procured. Two-digit branches like 72 (IT services), 45 (Construction), 33 (Healthcare equipment) catch a whole sector at once. Multi-select; matches are OR'd.

Value tier

Below threshold = the published value is under £139,000 — broadly the point below which buyers can run a lighter-touch process. In practice this is where most SME-winnable work sits: single-supplier contracts rather than frameworks. Above threshold = £139,000 and over — frameworks, major contracts, and formal regulated procedures. We use a single £139,000 line for consistency. The statutory figure is actually a family of thresholds that vary by buyer and contract type — central government sits near this line, while councils and NHS trusts have a higher one, and works contracts higher still. So the filter is on the cautious side for local-government work: a £160,000 council contract is genuinely below its own threshold, but we'll show it as above ours. One caveat worth knowing: a notice that doesn't publish a value can't be sorted into a tier, so it's treated as above threshold. Plenty of UK notices only disclose the figure at award, so if you filter to Below threshold you may miss some genuinely small contracts. Clear the tier filter if you want everything.

Value £ range

A precise pound range when the coarse tier isn't enough — set a "from", a "to", or both (e.g. just a max of £10,000). Tenders that don't publish a value ("Value TBC") are kept in the results too, since many UK buyers only disclose the figure at award — so you don't miss opportunities, and can judge them yourself.

Notice type

Contract notice (open competition), Pipeline notice (early heads-up), Preliminary Market Engagement (pre-tender), Award notice (already awarded — competitor research). Filter to Contract notice for active opportunities only.

Region

England / Scotland / Wales / Northern Ireland — where the work is. Taken from the notice's own location when it gives one, otherwise from the buying organisation's nation. Useful when you only deliver in a specific nation.

SME-friendly

Turn this on if you're an SME. A tender qualifies if either of these is true: 1. The buyer flagged it as suitable for small businesses when publishing the notice. 2. It's below threshold (under £139,000) — small enough that an SME can realistically bid, whether or not the buyer ticked the box. The second rule matters. Buyers often don't tick the SME box on smaller contracts because it's implied by the size, and some publishers omit the field entirely — so a flag-only filter would hide most of the SME-accessible market. This means the filter is deliberately a little generous: it errs towards showing you a contract you could bid for rather than hiding one.

Procurement procedure

How the buyer is running the competition, as they published it. Open means anyone may submit a tender. Restricted or Selective means passing a selection stage before you are invited to bid. Negotiated without a call for competition was never open to bid for at all — useful to exclude, or to study who wins direct awards. Stated on 81% of UK notices and 94% of EU ones; notices that did not state a procedure are left out of the filter rather than assumed to be open.

Market theme

Four fast-moving areas we tag beyond CPV: AI & machine learning, cyber security, net zero & decarbonisation and autonomous & uncrewed systems. CPV predates all four, so a machine-learning contract is often filed under generic IT services — the theme tag finds it anyway. A keyword scan proposes candidates and each one is confirmed before it is applied, so an address containing “AI” or a street called Solar Way does not get tagged. UK notices only.

Country

On the Export tab, narrows EU notices to the country publishing them. Combine with CPV to see one sector in one market.

Currency

EU notices are published in national currencies and we never convert between them. This filter picks the currency you want to work in, so a value range means one thing rather than several. Totals always cover one currency at a time.

Framework / DPS toggle

Three states each: any / only / exclude. Frameworks and DPSs are routes to market rather than single contracts. Pick "Only" if you're hunting framework places; "Exclude" for straightforward single contracts.

Closing within New

3, 7, 14 or 30 days. The question that actually matters when you're triaging isn't when a tender closes but whether there's time left to write it. Every card also carries a countdown — 2 days left under three days, 5 days left under a week. Tenders that don't publish a closing date are excluded from this filter — with no deadline there's nothing to measure. Clear the filter to see them.

Our bids New

Any / Not bidding yet / My workspace is bidding / I am bidding. The same question your pipeline answers, asked while you browse — Not bidding yet turns the list into genuinely new opportunities and stops two colleagues working the same tender. Signed-in only, since it compares against your workspace's pipeline.

Only what's new New

Narrows to notices published since you last looked. You don't have to switch it on to benefit — anything new to you already carries a NEW badge as you browse. The marker moves when you come back after a break, not on every page load — so it stays put while you filter, sort and page through. Your first ever visit marks nothing as new, because there's no earlier visit to measure from.

Not interested New

Hidden from my list (the default) / Only the ones I dismissed / Show everything. See Working the list down below.

A search you run every week has a problem a search you run once doesn't: it keeps showing you the same notices, including the ones you already looked at and rejected. These three things make the list get shorter as you work it.

Not interested

On any card, or on the tender's own page. It disappears from your list so you never triage it twice. Tick several and clear them together with Not interested in the action bar. It's yours alone. Your colleagues still see it — one person's judgement never hides an opportunity from the rest of the team.

Changed your mind?

The results header shows how many you've hidden and links straight to them; the Not interested filter gets you there too. Every row there has an Undo. Nothing is ever deleted by dismissing. Dismissing a tender you're bidding on doesn't touch the bid — it stays in your pipeline, with its tasks, comments and documents. To remove a bid, delete it from Bids.

Best fit No AI allowance used

A sort order that puts the tenders most like your work first, and chips them on the card: Strong fit, Good fit and Matches your profile, which marks a category you told us you work in but have not bid on yet. It reads the categories in your company profile and, once you have them, the procurement categories and buyers from your own bids — so the ranking costs nothing and uses none of your AI allowance. It appears as soon as your company profile describes what you do, and sharpens as you raise bids. With neither there is nothing to rank by, so we don't pretend otherwise. A tender without a fit chip isn't a bad tender. It just doesn't match your profile or anything you've bid on before — which is exactly what a new market looks like.

Once you've got a filter that surfaces tenders you actually care about, turn it into a standing alert in three steps.

1. 1

   Save this search

   With your filters set, click Save this search. Give it a name (e.g. "NHS IT services, England") and pick which notification channels should fire.

2. 2

   Let it re-run automatically

   Saved searches re-run after every ingest pass — three times a day — and dispatch notifications only when a new tender matches. Per-channel deduplication means you'll never get the same alert twice.

3. 3

   Manage and test

   Manage them at Account → Saved searches. Each has a Send test button that fires a synthetic notification to every configured channel — handy after setting up a new Slack webhook.

A buyer emailed you a PDF? Someone sent a link to a notice on another portal? Or you just have the text? Drop any of them into Import a tender (or click Import a tender on the Tenders page). The AI extracts buyer / deadline / value / scope automatically, scores it against your company profile, and saves it as a workspace-private tender you can pipeline like any other. Save is always available — even on a low score, you decide what's worth tracking.

Uploaded the same document twice? We check before spending anything: if your workspace has already imported a file with identical contents, we say so and offer the tender you already have, rather than making a second copy. Nothing is charged to your allowance for that check. If the document has genuinely been reissued or corrected, Import anyway takes you through.

Removing an import. Tenders your workspace uploaded can be deleted — from the tender's own page, or several at once from the list. Public notices can't be, since everyone shares them. If a bid has been raised against an import, deleting the tender also deletes that bid and its tasks, comments and documents — so the confirmation names exactly what will go before you commit.

Got the whole tender pack — the ITT, spec and schedules, not just one notice? Use Analyse a tender pack instead: upload all the documents together and the AI reads the lot in one pass, then hands you a requirements checklist (grouped into mandatory / submission / evaluation / eligibility / if-awarded), the key dates, and the risks that are easy to miss across hundreds of pages. It runs on its own monthly allowance (15 on a paid plan, 5 on trial).

Every tender page carries a panel of other open notices for comparable work. It answers “what else could we bid for?” — not “what else is this buyer doing?”, which is a different and usually less useful question.

Matching starts from what the work actually is. Every notice is tagged with the capabilities a supplier would need in order to bid — grounds maintenance, software development, social care and so on — derived from the buyer’s own procurement category, and refined where that category is too broad to say anything useful. Shared capabilities count for most of the ranking, then procurement category, region, contract size, and wording.