Navigating Delta, In-tend and Other Tender Portals

Keep these two jobs separate in your head and everything else falls into place.

The notice services are the shop windows. They are where contracting authorities are legally required to publish notices so the market can see the work. You search and set alerts here, but you rarely do anything transactional. The main GB ones are Find a Tender (the national service for higher-value and above-threshold notices), Contracts Finder (England, below and above threshold), Public Contracts Scotland (Scotland's own service), and Sell2Wales (Wales). Each notice tells you the scope, the value, the deadline and, crucially, which portal to go to next.

The buyer portals are the workshops. This is where you create a supplier account, download the tender documents in full, complete the selection questionnaire, upload your responses and submit. The buyer chose that portal; you have to use it. The big ones an SME meets are ProContract (Proactis), In-tend, Delta eSourcing, Jaggaer (formerly BravoSolution), and Atamis, which the NHS leans on heavily.

• ·Notice services = find the work, set alerts, read the summary.
• ·Buyer portals = register, get the full documents, answer, submit.
• ·One opportunity can appear on a notice service and be run on any of five or six different buyer portals.
• ·You will end up with several portal logins over time. That is normal, not a mistake you made.

Find a Tender is the national service that replaced the EU's OJEU/TED for the UK. Under the Procurement Act 2023 (live 24 February 2025) it carries the tender and contract notices for procurements at or above the main thresholds, and increasingly the below-threshold notices too. If you bid for larger public work anywhere in GB, this is your backbone feed.

Contracts Finder is England's service for lower-value and some higher-value opportunities. Below-threshold notice floors currently sit at around £12,000 including VAT for central government and £30,000 for the wider public sector, and much of that flows through Contracts Finder. It is where a lot of genuinely SME-sized work surfaces.

Public Contracts Scotland is a separate world. Scotland did not adopt the Procurement Act 2023; it runs its own regime under the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 and the 2015 and 2016 regulations, with its own thresholds (broadly around £50,000 for goods and services and £2m for works) and its own social and community-benefit rules. If you chase Scottish work, treat PCS as the definitive source and do not assume English rules apply.

Sell2Wales serves Wales, which does sit under the Procurement Act 2023 but with a Welsh overlay: the Wales Procurement Policy Statement and the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023 shape how buyers weight social value and local benefit. Same base law as England, extra Welsh expectations on top.

• ·Find a Tender - national, above-threshold and increasingly below, all of GB.
• ·Contracts Finder - England, strong for SME-sized and below-threshold work.
• ·Public Contracts Scotland - Scotland's own regime, do not assume PA23 applies.
• ·Sell2Wales - Wales, PA23 plus a Welsh social and local-benefit overlay.

Here is the part nobody warns you about: you register separately on every buyer portal, and there is no shared login. A ProContract account does nothing for you on In-tend. Budget an hour to set up each one properly the first time, capturing your company details, insurances, accreditations and standard policy documents so you are not re-keying them under deadline pressure.

ProContract, run by Proactis, is one of the most common local-authority and housing-association portals. You register once as a supplier, then get invited to or express interest in individual opportunities. The SQ and the full ITT are completed and submitted inside the portal.

In-tend is widely used across councils, universities and NHS trusts. It is per-buyer in feel, so you may hold In-tend accounts on several different authority-branded instances. Some instances add a reCAPTCHA or verification step, so do not leave first-time registration to the final afternoon.

Delta eSourcing is a long-standing national portal used by a broad mix of authorities. Its terminology (workspaces, response envelopes) trips people up, so open the documents early and read the submission instructions before you draft anything.

Jaggaer (you may still see it called BravoSolution) is common on central-government and larger-authority frameworks. It is powerful and correspondingly fiddly, with structured questionnaires and strict envelope separation between the technical and commercial responses.

Atamis is the NHS's preferred platform in much of England. If you sell into health, you will meet it. Note that some NHS clinical services run under the Provider Selection Regime rather than the Procurement Act 2023, so the process on Atamis may not look like a standard competitive tender.

• ·ProContract (Proactis) - councils, housing associations; register once, bid in-portal.
• ·In-tend - councils, universities, NHS trusts; often per-buyer instances.
• ·Delta eSourcing - broad national use; learn its workspace and envelope terms early.
• ·Jaggaer / BravoSolution - central government and large frameworks; strict envelope separation.
• ·Atamis - NHS England; watch for Provider Selection Regime, not always PA23.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, pass-or-fail selection is handled through conditions of participation (section 22): the certificates, insurances and financial standing that decide whether you are eligible to bid at all. These are separate from the award criteria (section 23), which are the comparative quality and price questions that decide who wins. Do not treat a selection question as a place to sell; do not treat an award question as a box-tick. Conflating the two is one of the most common first-time scoring losses.

On an open procedure, everything happens in one stage: you meet the conditions of participation and answer the award questions in a single submission. On a competitive flexible procedure (the Act's design-your-own multi-stage route that replaced the old named procedures like restricted and competitive dialogue), the buyer may run a shortlisting stage first and invite you to the full bid only if you pass. On older pre-February-2025 procurements and on Scottish tenders you will still see the legacy PCR names and a standard PQQ.

Whatever it is called, it is completed and submitted inside the buyer portal, not on the notice service. The portal hosts the question set, the character limits, the document upload slots and the final submit button. The notice service only pointed you there.

Almost every avoidable loss traces back to the same handful of portal mechanics. None of them are about the quality of your writing.

Deadlines are hard and portal clocks are ruthless. When a portal says 12:00, it locks at 12:00:00 by its own server clock, and a response that is 90 percent uploaded at the deadline scores zero. There is no grace and no appeal. Treat the stated time as at least two hours earlier than the real cut-off in your own planning.

File-size and format limits bite late. Portals cap individual and total upload sizes and often restrict formats to PDF. A 40MB scanned case study or a rejected .docx discovered at 11:50 is a preventable disaster. Check the limits the day you download the documents, not the day you submit.

Clarification windows close early. You can usually ask the buyer questions, but only until a stated deadline that is well before submission. If the specification is ambiguous, raise it in the first few days. Answers are published to all bidders, so a good clarification can quietly reshape the whole competition in your favour.

• ·Upload well before the deadline - aim to finish the day before, not the morning of.
• ·Confirm you receive a submission receipt or confirmation; no receipt means no bid.
• ·Check file-size caps and required formats (usually PDF) on day one.
• ·Use the clarification window early; the answers go to everyone.
• ·Keep the portal's helpdesk number to hand - you cannot call it at 11:55.

Once you are bidding regularly you will juggle several logins, and the admin becomes its own risk. A light routine keeps it from swamping the actual bid work.

Keep one shared, current library of the documents every portal asks for: employer's and public liability insurance certificates, professional indemnity, latest accounts, health and safety and quality policies, equality and environmental statements, and your standard case studies. Re-uploading the same evidence into five portals is tedious but fast when the files are ready and named clearly.

Register on a new portal as soon as you spot a relevant opportunity, not when you are ready to write. That separates the account-and-verification faff from the thinking. And read each portal's submission instructions before you draft, because Jaggaer's envelopes and Delta's workspaces impose structure on how you answer, not just where you upload.

• ·Maintain one master evidence pack, version-dated, ready to upload anywhere.
• ·Register early; never let verification delays collide with a deadline.
• ·Read submission mechanics before drafting, not after.
• ·Keep a simple log of which portal holds which bid and when it closes.

BidSquirrel sits on the first layer and helps you across the second. It pulls opportunities from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales and the buyer feeds behind them, scores each one against your business so you see the winnable work first, and points you to the portal the buyer is using. It does not replace those portals, and it does not submit for you. You still register and press submit on ProContract, In-tend, Delta, Jaggaer or Atamis yourself, because that is where the buyer runs the competition.

On the writing, BidSquirrel drafts with you, not for you. It builds structured draft paragraphs against the buyer's actual questions and framework, gives you live feedback and a score as you refine, and keeps your evidence in one place so it is ready to paste into whichever portal you are in. The words that go in stay yours; the moat is your evidence and your final judgement, not generic AI prose.