For suppliers · Portal guide
Using the supplier portal
Everything from finding an opportunity to finalising a submission, and what you can still change before the deadline. One login covers every market and every buyer you deal with through eSourcing Data, and your organisation details, insurances and accreditations are carried into every submission rather than re-entered.
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If you read nothing else
Three habits that prevent most problems
Use a monitored shared mailbox, and add colleagues as users. Registering against one person’s address is the commonest single cause of a missed deadline. Not because anyone was careless, but because that person was on holiday, had left, or simply did not open the email that day.
Finalise early, then amend. A finalised submission can be changed or withdrawn right up to the deadline. A submission still being assembled at ten to five cannot be rescued. Finalising something imperfect and improving it twice is strictly safer than aiming to finalise once, perfectly, at the last moment.
Report problems early. A technical issue raised with two days to go is nearly always resolvable. The same issue raised with two hours to go usually is not, and no goodwill on either side changes what the deadline does.
Step by step
From opportunity to outcome
Getting in
Your account is created when you register, and you sign in at suppliers.esourcingdata.com. One login covers every market and every buyer you deal with through us. Add colleagues rather than sharing one person’s credentials: registering against a single individual is the commonest reason a supplier misses a deadline, because that person is away, has left, or simply did not open the email.
Your dashboard
The first thing you see is what needs you: open opportunities in your parts, submissions in progress with their deadlines, anything awaiting a response from you, and evidence that is approaching expiry. It is deliberately a list of things to act on rather than a report on things that have happened.
Finding opportunities
Work in the parts you qualified for appears automatically and is notified to your contact address. You do not search for it. You are also not expected to bid for everything: an invitation is an opportunity, not an obligation, and a considered decline costs you nothing.
Expressing interest
Expressing interest opens the full documents and the clarification thread, and tells the buyer you are considering it. It commits you to nothing, and you can withdraw interest later without consequence. Do it early, because it is what gives you access to the questions other suppliers are asking.
Asking questions
Clarifications go through the portal thread, never by email. Answers are published to every supplier on the same terms, which is an equal treatment obligation rather than a nicety. Read the whole thread before asking: somebody has usually asked your question already, and the answer to a question you did not think of is often the more valuable one.
Building your submission
Responses to the buyer’s questions, your pricing, and any documents or annexes required. Your organisation details, insurances and accreditations are already held and carried in, so the submission is about method, price, delivery and social value rather than paperwork. Save as you go; there is no need to complete it in one sitting.
Finalising, amending, withdrawing
Finalising marks the submission as your intended answer. It is not irreversible: up to the deadline you can amend it, or withdraw it entirely. This is why finalising early is the better habit. A finalised submission that you improve twice is safer than a perfect one still being assembled at ten to five.
The deadline
Submissions lock. Nothing arrives afterwards, nothing is accepted late by accident, and nobody is making a judgement call about an email that came in four minutes after the hour. If you have not finalised by the deadline, you have not submitted, and no amount of goodwill changes that.
After the deadline
Your submission is evaluated against the published criteria, moderated, and a decision recorded with its reasoning. You are told the outcome, and if you were unsuccessful you receive an assessment summary explaining why. Read it properly: the same evaluators will see your next bid, and it usually names the thing to change.
Before you commit
Reading the pack, and deciding whether to bid
The most valuable half hour in any tender is the one spent deciding whether to enter it. Bidding for everything is how small teams exhaust themselves producing mediocre submissions for work they were never going to win. Once you have expressed interest, the full pack is open to you, and it answers most of the question.
Read the criteria and the weightings first
Before the specification, before the background, before anything else. The weightings tell you what the buyer will actually reward, and occasionally they reveal that the thing you are strongest at carries five per cent of the marks.
Check the mandatory requirements honestly
Insurance levels, accreditations, minimum turnover, geographic coverage. If you do not meet a mandatory requirement you will not be scored, however good the rest is. It is better to know that on day one than after three days of writing.
Look at the timetable against your capacity
Deadline, clarification cut-off, and any presentation or site visit. Then look at what else your team is doing that fortnight. A rushed bid submitted on time frequently scores worse than no bid at all, because it costs you the same effort and adds a loss to your record.
Work out whether you actually want the contract
The terms, the payment profile, the volume commitment, the social value expected. Work you win on terms you cannot deliver profitably is worse than work you did not win, and it is visible in your performance record afterwards.
Decide, and decline visibly if the answer is no
Declining is a legitimate answer and it costs your membership nothing. Doing it visibly rather than silently is worth the thirty seconds: the buyer learns their market responded, and a market that visibly responds attracts more buyers, which brings you more of the work you do want.
One habit worth building: if something in the pack is genuinely unclear, ask through the clarification thread rather than guessing. Buyers would far rather answer a question than evaluate five submissions that all misread the same paragraph, and the answer reaches every bidder, so nobody is disadvantaged by your asking.
Writing it
What a strong submission looks like
The portal will not write your bid, but it will show you exactly what is being asked and how it is weighted, and a surprising number of submissions lose marks for reasons that have nothing to do with capability.
Answer the question that was asked
Evaluators score against published criteria, not against how impressive your organisation is. A brilliant answer to a question nobody asked scores zero. Read the criterion, then answer it in the order it is written, so the person scoring can find each element without hunting.
Be specific where you can be counted
Named people, actual timescales, real numbers. "Extensive experience" is unscoreable. "Fourteen similar schemes in the last three years, two of them for this buyer" is a fact somebody can award marks against.
Price the thing that was specified
Qualifications and assumptions are legitimate, but bury them and you look evasive. State them plainly in the place provided rather than in a footnote somebody finds after scoring.
Attach the evidence, not a description of it
If a criterion asks for a method statement, a policy or a certificate, attach the document. An evaluator who has to ask for it has already marked what was in front of them.
Commit to social value you will deliver
Countable outcomes, not intentions. Winning commitments become contract obligations that you report against, so over-promising to win is a problem moved to month six and it follows you into your performance record.
Leave time for the upload
Large documents, slow connections and last-minute discoveries are real. Finalise early with what you have, then amend. The deadline does not negotiate.
After you win
The portal does not stop at award
Winning is where most supplier portals go quiet. Yours does not: the contract you were awarded is visible to you, and so is what you committed to.
Where a buyer runs grant funding through the platform, grant opportunities and applications appear in the same place, on the same login, rather than in a separate system with separate credentials.
What reaches you
Notifications
You are notified when an opportunity appears in a part you qualified for, when a clarification is answered on something you have expressed interest in, when a deadline is approaching on a submission you have not finalised, when an outcome is published, and when evidence is coming up for expiry.
All of it also sits in the portal, so a notification that goes astray is an inconvenience rather than a missed opportunity. That is the argument for a shared mailbox and multiple users rather than trusting one inbox and one person’s attention.
Who sees what
Access and confidentiality
Your submission is yours. Other suppliers do not see your responses, your pricing or your documents, before or after the deadline. What is shared is the clarification thread, deliberately, because answers must reach every bidder on the same terms.
Within your own organisation, the users you add can see and work on your submissions, which is the point of adding them. Every action is logged with who did it and when, so an amendment at four o’clock is attributable rather than mysterious.
Bidding together
Consortium and joint bids
Plenty of worthwhile packages are too large for one SME and comfortably within reach of three. The portal supports bidding together, and each member’s qualification is already held rather than reassembled for the bid.
Create or join
Set up a consortium for a specific opportunity, or find one already forming that needs what you do.
Find partners
Look for suppliers whose capability complements yours, rather than duplicates it. The portal surfaces matches.
Talk before you commit
Message potential partners through the portal so the conversation is recorded alongside the opportunity.
Bid together
Submit as a consortium, with each member’s qualification already held rather than reassembled.
Keeping it current
Your profile is the thing that saves you time
Every hour spent keeping your organisation record current is an hour you do not spend on each subsequent bid. Three things are worth a diary reminder rather than a reaction.
Pull from the CDP when government data changes
A new share code refreshes your identity, core business information, connected persons and exclusion information from the Central Digital Platform. Correct things there, not here, so there is one version rather than two that disagree.
Replace evidence before it expires
Reminders arrive ninety, thirty and seven days out. Membership depends on continuing to meet the conditions, so evidence left to lapse puts it at risk, and nobody should lose work over a certificate nobody chased.
Keep users and contacts accurate
People leave. Remove them, add their replacement, and keep the main contact on a mailbox somebody actually monitors rather than an individual who might be away.
When something is not right
Common problems, and what they usually are
You cannot see an opportunity you expected
It is almost always parts. You are shown work in the parts you qualified for, so if a category you deliver is missing, apply for that part. It is not a closing-date problem, because there is no closing date.
You have missed a notification
Check the contact address on your profile. If it is one person’s inbox, change it to a monitored shared mailbox and add colleagues as users.
Your evidence has expired
Upload the replacement. You are reminded at ninety, thirty and seven days, and membership depends on continuing to meet the conditions, so expired evidence left unreplaced puts it at risk.
Your core details are wrong
Correct them on the Central Digital Platform and pull a refreshed share code, rather than editing a second copy here that then disagrees with the government record.
Something technical is failing
Report it through the portal immediately, not at the deadline. A problem raised with two days to go is nearly always resolvable; the same problem raised with two hours to go often is not.
Getting help
Support, and using the portal on your terms
Not every supplier has a bid team. A great many have one person who does the bidding alongside running the business, usually in the evening, and a portal that assumes otherwise excludes exactly the small specialists a dynamic market exists to bring in.
So: you can save and return rather than completing anything in one sitting, several colleagues can work on the same submission, and questions about how the portal works come to us rather than to the buyer, whose job is the procurement rather than the software. Questions about the requirement itself go to the buyer through the clarification thread, because those answers have to reach everybody on the same terms.
If something about the portal is genuinely difficult to use, we would rather hear it than not. A supplier who gives up quietly is invisible to us and to the buyer, and the work goes to whoever found the form easier rather than to whoever would have done the job best.
Questions
Using the portal, answered
Where do I log in to the supplier portal?
At suppliers.esourcingdata.com. Your account is created when you register, and the same login covers every market and every buyer you deal with through eSourcing Data, so there is one set of credentials rather than one per procurement.
Can more than one person from my company use the portal?
Yes, and they should. Registering against one individual’s email address is the most common cause of a supplier missing a deadline: the person is on holiday, has left, or simply did not see it. Add colleagues so responsibility is shared and use a monitored shared mailbox for the main contact.
How do I know when there is work I could bid for?
Opportunities in the parts you qualified for appear in the portal and are notified to your contact address. You do not have to search for them, and you are not expected to bid for all of them.
What does expressing interest actually do?
It tells the buyer you are considering the opportunity and gives you access to the full documents and the clarification thread. It does not commit you to submitting, and you can withdraw interest afterwards without any consequence.
Can I change my submission after I have finalised it?
Yes, up to the deadline. A finalised submission can be amended, and it can be withdrawn entirely. What you cannot do is change anything after the deadline passes, which is why finalising early and amending later is a better habit than leaving everything until the last afternoon.
What happens exactly at the deadline?
Submissions lock. Nothing arrives late, nothing is accepted late by accident, and nobody has to make a judgement call about an email that came in four minutes after the hour. If you have not finalised by then, you have not submitted.
How do I ask a question about a tender?
Through the clarification thread in the portal, not by email. Answers are published to every supplier on the same terms, which is an equal treatment obligation rather than a courtesy. It also means you can read what others have asked, which is frequently more useful than asking your own.
Can we bid as a consortium?
Yes. The portal supports consortium and joint bidding, including finding potential partners and messaging them, which matters for larger packages where no single SME could carry the whole requirement but several together comfortably can.
Do I have to re-enter my company details for every tender?
No. Your organisation profile, insurances and accreditations are held once and carried into every submission. That is most of the value of a market: you bid on the work rather than on paperwork you have uploaded eleven times before.
How do I keep my information up to date?
Update your profile in the portal, and pull refreshed core information from the Central Digital Platform with a share code whenever your government-held data changes. Evidence with expiry dates is tracked, and you are reminded ninety, thirty and seven days before anything lapses.
Will I find out why we lost?
Yes. Unsuccessful bidders receive an assessment summary explaining the decision against the published criteria. It is worth reading properly rather than filing: the same evaluators will see your next submission, and the summary usually tells you exactly what to do differently.
Something is not working. What do I do?
Raise it through the portal rather than sitting on it, and do it well before a deadline. A technical problem reported with two hours to go is a very different conversation from the same problem reported with two days to go, and the second one is nearly always resolvable.
Ready to sign in
One login, every market and every buyer you deal with through us. If you have not registered yet, the walkthrough takes about forty-five minutes with your documents to hand.