1. Setting up the procurement
A new tender is created as a draft with a reference drawn from your own organisation’s series, default evaluation weightings, an access mode, and a procurement regime: above threshold, below threshold, or unregulated. The regime is the single most consequential field on the form, because it decides whether Find a Tender notices are produced at all, whether assessment summaries are compulsory before award, and whether a standstill period is applied afterwards. Set it wrongly at the start and you will be corrected by a refusal later rather than by a warning now.
The person who creates the tender becomes its owner. Tender documents are uploaded against a document type rather than into a general folder, which is what lets the platform record precisely which supplier downloaded which document and when.
When you need to sift: the multi-stage procurement
A multi-stage procurement is not a different object with different rules. It is a cohesively managed chain of tenders, each stage a tender in its own right, referenced as your procurement reference followed by -S1, -S2 and so on. Stage one may be open. Every stage after it is forced to restricted access, because by then the field is the suppliers you shortlisted. Awarding from a non-final stage is refused outright: at a non-final stage the action available to you is shortlisting, which invites the successful suppliers into the next stage’s tender and emails everyone else that they are not progressing.
2. Preliminary market engagement
Engagement before you write the specification is the part most teams do in an inbox and then cannot evidence. In the platform you create an engagement, attach documents, invite suppliers by email, publish it, collect responses, answer engagement-specific clarifications, and close it. Responses export as CSV, which matters when you need to show how the market shaped the requirement.
Publishing an engagement builds and holds a UK2 preliminary market engagement notice. The engagement itself stays a draft and only becomes visible to suppliers on the portal when that notice is actually released. An open engagement gets public per-document download links written into the engagement-process field, because UK2 has no structured slot for documents. An invite-only engagement gets a pointer to the portal instead, never public links, so a closed engagement does not quietly become an open one through its own notice.
When the engagement is finished you convert it into a draft tender. It inherits the title, description, category and CPV codes, and, more usefully, the same OCID, so Find a Tender threads the engagement notice and the eventual tender notice together as one procurement rather than two unrelated events.
3. Publishing, and why the notice is the advertisement
Publish runs three compliance checks before anything is committed, and each refusal cites the rule and explains it in plain English:
- Find a Tender R543. The description must be longer than the title. A description that repeats the title is the most common reason a notice bounces.
- Find a Tender R906. Contract start and end dates must both be present, and the end must not precede the start.
- PA23 section 20. An above-threshold stage-one tender must be open access. There is no restricted procedure under the Act, and an invitation-only list at the first stage is not permitted. The refusal tells you to run it as a multi-stage procurement instead, which is the compliant way to get to the same place.
Then the part that surprises people. A regulated tender does not go live when you press Publish.It stays a draft while its UK4 tender notice is built and held for review. The publication date is set at that moment, because that is the notice’s own publication date, but suppliers on the portal cannot see the opportunity until the notice is released to Find a Tender. That ordering is the point: a supplier already on your portal should never get a head start on the market. Below-threshold and unregulated tenders, which produce no Find a Tender tender notice, are advertised immediately.
Reviewing and releasing a notice
Notices sit on their own screen with a preview and a release action that requires an explicit confirmation. Release is refused if the payload was built for a different Find a Tender environment, if it has already been delivered to that environment, or under rule R074, which prevents a UK5, UK6 or UK7 going out before the linked UK4’s deadline. That last check runs from our own record, so it holds even on the sandbox. Everything is XSD-validated and rule-validated at the production weight regardless of which environment you are releasing to, so you meet the live bar during a rehearsal rather than on the day. If a submission times out it is recorded as an unknown outcome rather than as a clean failure, because the difference matters when you are deciding whether to resend.
4. Inviting suppliers, and how access is actually granted
You invite by email, either from the supplier directory or as free text. Each invitation mints its own token, so the emailed link resolves with no account at all: the landing page shows the buyer name, reference, title, deadline and a masked version of the invited email address, and nothing else. No documents, no values. The supplier signs in or registers, then accepts, and acceptance binds the invitation to their organisation so their colleagues get in too. An invitation already bound to a different supplier is never re-pointed.
Three routes count as invited: a matching supplier record, an exact email match, or the company email domain. Domain-granted access binds itself on first use and records how it was claimed, so you can see who came in that way and revoke it. Re-inviting an address resends on the same record rather than creating a second one, which preserves who invited whom and when, and clears any earlier revocation. An uninvited supplier who guesses the address of a restricted tender gets a 404, not a 403, so its existence is not confirmed.
5. Clarifications, and equal treatment you can evidence
A supplier opens a thread with a subject, a body and up to ten attachments. You see every thread on the tender, reply with attachments of your own, and where the answer affects everybody you set the thread to published. It is then broadcast to every supplier on that tender with the asker anonymised to “A supplier” and their attachments hidden. Suppliers see their own threads plus every published thread.
Two design decisions are worth knowing before your first live exercise. First, the channel stays open past the enquiry deadline and past the tender deadline, and closes only when the procurement is concluded, because a bidder who has just been told they were unsuccessful still needs to be able to read the answers their bid was written against. When posting is closed the interface shows a read-only notice with the reason rather than a composer that will be rejected. Second, every document download is written to your audit trail with the supplier, the document and the timestamp. That log is the evidence of what was made available, and when at the same time, which is not something you can demonstrate afterwards from an inbox.
6. Evaluation: the four annexes
Bids arrive through the portal, not by email, and cannot be created, edited or amended after the deadline: a supplier can withdraw or reopen a bid before the deadline and not after it. Scoring is restricted to assigned evaluators, administrators and the entity owner, and ownership is read from the ownership record rather than from whoever created the tender, so a departing colleague does not take the permission with them.
- Annex A, supplier information. Pass or fail. A fail marks the bid disqualified with a recorded reason.
- Annex B, commercial. The price.
- Annex C, technical and social value. Scored per question, per evaluator, capped at that question’s maximum marks.
- Annex D, compliance. Pass or fail, with the same disqualification effect as Annex A.
Weighted totals recompute after every write. Every score write reads the prior score first and records it as a previous score with a revision flag, which is the difference between a correction made during moderation and a score that changed after the bidders were known. Alongside the annexes you have conflict-of-interest declarations, Procurement Act exclusion-ground checks per submission, a responses CSV, per-submission document downloads and a documents ZIP, and an evaluation PDF. An optional AI analysis can suggest a score, and the suggestion is stored beside the human score with its reasoning rather than in place of it.
Moderation, and the permission that makes it real
The panel has a status, and an assigned evaluator can move it in exactly one direction: to moderation. They cannot reopen it, complete it, or move it back, and the attempt is refused. Moderation notes are held on the panel, and the owners are notified both when it is submitted for moderation and when it is completed. That single asymmetry is what makes the moderation record worth having.
7. Assessment summaries, award and standstill
Before any above-threshold award you generate assessment summaries under section 50. Each bidder gets their own letter, award, unsuccessful or disqualified, ranked on final score with disqualified bids excluded from the ranking, carrying that bidder’s own commercial, technical and final scores. Sending delivers an in-app notification to every user at that supplier plus an email with the letter attached.
Award itself is refused unless each of these holds:
- It is the final stage, if this is a multi-stage procurement.
- The winner’s evaluation is complete: Annex A passed, Annex D passed, Annex C scored, not disqualified. Every outstanding item is named at once rather than one refusal at a time.
- For a direct award, a UK5 transparency notice exists and at least eight days have elapsed under section 44, with the days remaining reported back to you.
- For an above-threshold procurement, assessment summaries have been sent.
On success the tender becomes awarded and, for above-threshold only, an eight working day standstill is set, calculated with weekends and UK bank holidays excluded. Below-threshold and unregulated procurements get no standstill, because none is owed.
Awarding does not publish anything. It drops a prefilled draft UK6 contract award notice into Notices, carrying the winner’s registered identity, their PPON or company number and its identifier scheme, so the published notice can name them under their own register as R309 requires. An owner reviews it, completes it and releases it through the same confirm step as every other notice.
8. The contract record
Confirming the contract is refused while the standstill end date is in the future, and the refusal tells you the date and how many days are left. It is also refused if a contract already exists, returning the existing one rather than creating a duplicate. On success it creates the contract with its own reference, a value taken from the winning bid price and falling back to the tender estimate, a start date of now and an end date two years out, the tender’s owners inherited, and three default KPIs: service delivery against a 99% monthly SLA, customer satisfaction at 85% quarterly, and social value delivery at 100% annually. Adjust the dates, value and KPIs to the contract you actually awarded.
Be clear about what is available today. The contract record itself is reachable and workable, and the backend genuinely supports KPIs, risks, social-value commitments, modifications, termination and manual payment recording for payment-compliance statistics. The contracts list page is locked for every account and shows an “available on request” panel, so contract management is enabled by arrangement rather than switched on by default. The winning supplier can see the contract and its KPIs read-only, with no route to update a KPI actual, upload evidence or submit an invoice.
9. What is not there, so you can plan around it
A guide that only lists capabilities is not much use when you are scoping an implementation. Six buyer areas are locked in the interface for every account today, administrators included: the contracts list, social value, frameworks, grants, dynamic markets, advanced reporting and the AI assistant. Their backends are real and working, and access is arranged rather than self-served, but no buyer reaches them through the product as it ships.
Beyond that: there is no e-signature integration, so award and contract creation are records rather than signatures. There is no purchase-to-pay, no purchase orders, no invoice matching and no payment execution; what exists is manual payment recording so days-to-pay can be computed. There is no single sign-on, SAML, OIDC or Entra ID federation: authentication is email and password with optional two-factor by authenticator app or emailed code. There are no e-auctions and no catalogue or punchout purchasing. And the platform publishes to Find a Tender rather than pulling from it, so suppliers browsing the portal see only opportunities hosted here.
Central Digital Platform, stated accurately
Notice submission to Find a Tender is live and real: notices are composed against the UK-native schema, validated, held for a named person, and released over the eSender API, with test and live environments kept strictly apart by a check that refuses any call whose destination contradicts its environment. Data sharing is a separate thing. Suppliers can save their share code, PPON and SSQ code on their profile today and you can see them, but redeeming a share code to pull verified details is switched off and needs Central Digital Platform credentials from onboarding. Nothing on the platform verifies a company number or a share code, so treat both as references on file, not as verified identity.
Where to start
Run one real procurement rather than migrating a programme. A below-threshold exercise is the cleanest first run, because it advertises immediately and carries no standstill, which lets you learn the clarification and evaluation mechanics without a notice deadline in the way. Then do an above-threshold open procurement, and validate before releasing: validation runs at the production weight either way, so a rehearsal tells you what the live release will do.