Coverage & methodology

Coverage map

Exactly what we ingest every day, and what sits outside our scope - so you always know where the feed begins and ends.

Coverage spans Great Britain - England, Scotland and Wales, from the national portals down to the low-value local-authority work that often never reaches a national site.

How often the data refreshes

Our connectors run every day, pulling new and updated notices from each source and re-scoring them against the businesses on the platform. New coverage and re-scored matches surface in your dashboard automatically. Live counts shown on the site are read from the database at page load, not hard-coded.

How each tender is scored

Every tender is assessed by an AI built and regression-tested as a UK procurement specialist - not a general-purpose chatbot. It reads each notice under the right regime (Procurement Act 2023, the legacy rules, NHS Provider Selection Regime, and the devolved Scottish and Welsh regimes), then scores the opportunity against your business, scale, location and growth goals:

• Stronga genuine fit you should seriously consider
• Fairworkable, with caveats worth weighing
• Developmentan on-strategy stretch aligned to your stated growth goals

You always see the reasoning behind a score, never a black-box number, so you stay in control of the call. For the full detail on how the AI is built and tested, see how our AI works.

Sector expertise, where we have it

On top of the procurement-law reading, BidSquirrel reads each notice through a sector-experienced lens. For the fields we cover deepest, it applies the standards, accreditations and evaluation patterns a specialist bid lead in that field would recognise - raising the questions an experienced practitioner would ask, rather than matching keywords. Five sectors are covered in depth today:

Outside these five, the AI stays capable but general - it never fakes depth it does not have. That partial-but-honest coverage is deliberate: we would rather cover a handful of sectors properly than claim expertise everywhere.

The standards it references are named, current and re-checked - each verified against its primary source, with a monthly currency check so it never leans on a standard that has since lapsed or been superseded. And it stays complementary to the procurement-law reading above, not a replacement for it: the regime tells you which rules govern the award (Procurement Act 2023, the legacy rules, NHS Provider Selection Regime, the devolved regimes); the sector lens tells you what an experienced practitioner in that field would probe. It raises what a specialist would raise - you still answer from your own delivery knowledge.

A worked example, end to end

Talking about scoring is easy; here is one run through it. The tender below is an anonymised example - the figures and wording are representative, not a real notice - but it shows exactly what you would see, and why.

Eligibility checks first. Before any fit score, the notice is read for the pass/fail gates that decide whether a bid is even worth writing. Here is what that surfaces:

• PassISO 9001 quality management

  Asked for, but the notice accepts an equivalent documented quality system - the firm's existing process maps qualify, so this is met without the certificate.

• PassSSIP / CHAS accreditation

  Required for health and safety pre-qualification. The firm already holds CHAS, so this clears.

• Action neededEmployer's liability insurance ≥ £10m

  The firm currently carries £5m. This is a hard gate - the bid cannot proceed until cover is raised, though that is a phone call to a broker, not a barrier to entry.

• PassMinimum annual turnover £600k

  The notice sets a turnover floor of roughly two times the annual contract value. At ~£900k the firm is comfortably over it.

Then the verdict and the reasoning. With one gate flagged but fixable, the work itself a clean match, and the buyer within sensible travel distance, this scores:

Had the firm been £200k under the turnover floor, the same notice would have come back Fair- workable, but only via a partner or a parent-company guarantee. Had it been a £30m county-wide contract well beyond the firm's current scale, it would have been flagged Development: off today's capacity, but on-strategy if growth into larger prime contracts is the stated goal.

Where a human still decides

The example above does the triage - the part that otherwise eats an afternoon per notice. It does not make the decision for you, and it is worth being plain about the line:

• The bid / no-bid call is yours

  A "Strong" score says this is worth your time, not that you should drop everything. Your pipeline, your capacity this quarter and your appetite for the buyer are things only you can weigh.

• We draft the bid with you, not for you

  BidSquirrel helps you structure the response, scores your draft and feeds back where it is thin - but the evidence, the references and the final words are yours. It will not invent case studies, fabricate accreditations or ghostwrite a submission you cannot stand behind.

• We help you price it, but you own the number

  Price and value-for-money can be most of a public score, so we build a costed breakdown from the scope, recommend a price band and write the value-for-money case - working from your own rates or clearly-labelled estimates you confirm. We read recent comparable award values to sense-check the band, but we present them as comparables, never a precise market rate, and we never hand you a single oracle number. Every figure is yours to set and defend.

• Borderline eligibility needs a human read

  Where a requirement turns on the exact wording of the notice - an "or equivalent" clause, a contested turnover test, a framework lot definition - we flag it and point you to the official notice rather than ruling it in or out for you.

• We do not verify your figures or submit on your behalf

  We never file a bid, never sign anything, and cannot confirm your insurance, certificates or accounts are current. Always check each opportunity, deadline and requirement against the official notice before you act.

Where the data comes from

The tender notices we aggregate are public information published by contracting authorities. This service contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We aggregate and add guidance on top; we are not the publisher of the underlying notices.

Accuracy and limits

BidSquirrel is decision support, not legal or procurement advice, and not a substitute for the official notice. Sources can change their data, and AI guidance can be wrong - so always verify each opportunity, deadline and requirement against the official notice before you act. Our Terms set out the full position, and our Privacy Policycovers how we handle your data (we never use your data to train AI models; an ITT you add is the buyer's common tender pack, kept as a shared reference for that tender so other bidders don't re-upload it, while your own answers, drafts and evidence stay private to you).

Who maintains this

BidSquirrel is built and run by Orcana Ltd (company no. 17263330), registered in England & Wales and with the ICO (no. ZC171438), based in Hull. It was built by people who have run and evaluated public-sector procurements - which is why the scoring works like an evaluation panel rather than a keyword search. Questions about our coverage or method? Email hello@bidsquirrel.co.uk.