Coverage & methodology

What we cover

Every day we ingest every major GB public-sector source into one feed:

• Find a Tender (Central Digital Platform)

  The UK government's central service for new above-threshold tenders under the Procurement Act 2023, including Welsh above-threshold work.

• Contracts Finder

  England's register of public contracts and lower-value opportunities, plus notices from procurements begun under the older PCR 2015 rules.

• Public Contracts Scotland (PCS)

  Scotland runs its own regime; almost every regulated Scottish opportunity is advertised here.

• ProContract council portals (sub-£30k)

  The local-authority systems carrying the below-threshold and quick-quote council work most national-only tools never see.

Coverage spans Great Britain - England, Scotland and Wales, from the national portals down to the sub-£30k council work that often never reaches a national site.

What we do not cover

Being straight about the gaps matters more than a bigger claim:

• Northern Ireland (eTendersNI)

  NI procures under its own transferred arrangements via eTendersNI; we do not yet ingest it, so NI-only notices may be missed (above-threshold NI work still appears via Find a Tender).

• Republic of Ireland (eTenders.gov.ie)

  Out of scope - BidSquirrel covers Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) only.

• Private-sector tenders

  We cover public-sector and public-body procurement, not private commercial RFPs.

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 trained and 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 service line, 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.

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 Policy covers how we handle your data (uploaded tender documents are processed in memory and are not used to train any AI model).

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.