Help / Getting started

A five-minute tour

What DataScene Tenders is, who uses it, and how the moving parts fit together end-to-end.

What is DataScene Tenders?

A single workspace for the whole tender lifecycle — from discovery (find the right contracts) through to win (track which bids you submitted, who reviewed them, and what happened). It aggregates the public-sector procurement feeds you'd otherwise have to monitor separately, then adds the tooling you usually rebuild in spreadsheets.

Your seven-step setup checklist

After signing up, you land on the welcome tour — a guided checklist that walks you through the seven steps that turn an empty account into a working tender-tracking workspace. Each step takes under a minute. Progress is computed live from what you've actually done, so completed steps tick themselves off as you go.

The seven steps

  1. 1

    Build your company profile

    Powers AI scoring so every tender is matched against what you actually sell.

  2. 2

    Set up a saved search

    A specific filter that fires whenever a matching notice publishes.

  3. 3

    Add a notification channel

    Email, Slack, Teams or webhook — choose where alerts land.

  4. 4

    Create your first bid

    Turn a tender into a trackable card on the pipeline.

  5. 5

    Invite a team member

    Up to 5 seats on one workspace, no per-seat charge.

  6. 6

    Save reusable content to the bid library

    PQQ answers, win themes and case studies you can paste into future bids.

  7. 7

    Turn on two-factor authentication

    Adds a second layer of protection to your account.

A compact panel on /bids

The same checklist also appears as a small panel at the top of Bids so you can tick items off without leaving the kanban. Dismiss it any time with the × button — the panel hides for good once dismissed, but you can re-show it from the welcome tour.

Try the kanban with sample data first

Not ready to log a real bid yet? Click Load 3 sample bids on the welcome page. We seed three representative bids spanning Interested → Pursuing → Submitted so you can explore the kanban, comments, sign-off and Q&A features without finding a real tender first. Remove them any time with one click.

Who uses it

Sales teams at SMEs

Replace "someone checks the portals every morning" with saved alerts that hit the inbox the moment something relevant publishes.

Bid managers

Run the pipeline as a real kanban with assignees, documents, EOI deadlines, win/loss reasons, and a built-in review step.

Account managers

Track the suppliers you compete with — get an alert within 24 hours every time they win something new.

Operations / leadership

Weekly emailed digest of pipeline win-rate, top buyers in the sector, supplier league tables — no manual reporting overhead.

The lifecycle, end to end

WHAT FEEDS THE LOOP Frameworks a second way in — get on before it closes AUTOMATIC · NOTHING TO CLICK theme tags · capability tags pipeline signals Awards & market intel who won comparable work, at what price Set up Discover Qualify Bid prep Learn Bid? your profile+ alerts Tenders + savedsearches the tender pageis it worth it? your bid pipelineinterested → submitted won or lostrecord why yes no — mark not interested, keep looking Company profile the context every AI answer is built on AI search Summary Fit score Similar tenders Tender pack analysis Compliance gaps Clarification questions Draft an EOI Bid-library match Win/loss patterns the call is yours, not the model's every result sharpens the next bid — better profile, more reusable content, clearer patterns
Six stages, and a loop rather than a line — what you learn from a result feeds the next bid. The three boxes along the top are not stages: they feed it. Frameworks are a second way in, awards are the evidence you weigh at Qualify, and the tagging happens to every notice before you arrive. The purple boxes are the AI steps; Bid? deliberately has none, because that call is yours.
a stage you work in an AI step the feedback loop

Each stage in detail:

  1. 1

    Discover

    Browse Tenders with the filter, or set up saved searches that fire whenever a new match lands. Coverage spans central government, the NHS, the devolved nations, councils and European markets — refreshed three times a day.

  2. 2

    Qualify

    Open any tender's detail page to see the buyer profile (other notices they've issued, typical spend) and a pricing benchmark from comparable awards. Helps you size the opportunity before reading the spec.

  3. 3

    Decide

    One-click Add to bids from any tender pre-fills a new bid card. If an Expression of Interest is required, log the EOI deadline and we'll remind you.

    Already have a tender pack from a buyer email or another portal? Drop it into Import a tender — the AI extracts the structured fields, scores it against your profile, and saves it as a workspace-private tender ready to pipeline.

  4. 4

    Bid prep

    Assign team members, attach documents from the encrypted library, work through a deliverables checklist, paste in standard answers from your Bid library.

  5. 5

    Review

    Move the bid to In review. A reviewer signs it off — stamps reviewer + timestamp on the record and advances it to Submitted.

  6. 6

    Track

    Win or lose, log the outcome and the reason. Your win-rate, pipeline value and average days-to-decision feed straight into the Bid Pipeline Summary report.

  7. 7

    Compete

    Track companies you bid against. When they win, you'll see it on the Awards page within 24 hours.

Tip — start with one saved search

A noisy alert nobody reads is worse than no alert at all. Set up one specific filter (a CPV branch you really sell into, in the region you cover) before going broad. You can always widen it later.

What you get out of the box

Whole-of-UK public-sector tender coverage, refreshed 3 times a day — plus tender import for packs from elsewhere

Saved searches with email / Slack / Teams / webhook dispatch

Six-stage bid kanban with assignees + documents + checklists

Org-scoped bid library — PQQ answers, win themes, case studies

Scheduled reports from pre-defined templates delivered by email

REST API with scoped tokens — wire into your CRM

Contract-award browsing + supplier tracking with 24h alerts

Up to 5 team members on one workspace — no per-seat charge