Finding tenders: the scout and its match rules
Where Achekam's tender scout finds South African tenders, how its match score comes from fixed rules, and which menu entries and settings to ignore.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa
For firms that bid for public-sector work, such as municipal audit support, internal audit for an entity, forensic investigations or accounting services for a department, finding the advert is the first hurdle. Someone checks the National Treasury eTenders portal every morning, scrolls past dozens of irrelevant notices, and still occasionally misses the one tender the firm was built for because it was advertised under an unexpected category.
A tender scout should do the scrolling. What a partner needs to know is where it looks, how it decides what counts as a match, and where it falls short.
This is how Achekam's scout works, including the parts of its menu and settings that do not do what their names suggest.
Where the adverts come from
Achekam's tender scout reads live adverts from two kinds of source:
- The National Treasury eTenders public data feed. This is the main source for South African public-sector tenders.
- Any public RSS or Atom feed the firm adds. Useful for buyers who publish their own notices, or for a sector body's tender page.
The scout lives under TENDERS & BIDS > Tender Intelligence. The same adverts can be searched on National Treasury's eTenders portal, which lists advertised, awarded and cancelled tenders from public sector organisations in all spheres of government.
One detail matters for RSS sources. Some feeds publish a tender without a closing date. Achekam gives such a tender a closing date 30 days after publication, so it can sit in the pipeline with a deadline. That date is a placeholder, not the buyer's. Always open the tender documents and replace it with the real closing date before planning any work against it.
Entering a tender by hand
Not every opportunity arrives through a feed. A tender may be sent directly by a buyer, picked up at a briefing session, or published on a portal the scout does not read. Staff can enter a tender by hand, with its documents, and it then follows the same path as any other.
That is also the answer for the sources the scout does not yet reach.
Sources shown as not connected
Some well-known procurement sources, such as CIDB, Transnet and Eskom, appear in Achekam but are shown as not connected. The scout does not read them. If your firm bids for work from those buyers, someone still checks their portals directly and enters relevant tenders by hand.
A not-connected label is honest, and it is better than a source that appears connected and quietly returns nothing. But it does mean the scout's list is not a complete picture of the market.
How the match score is worked out
Each tender shows a match score, labelled "AI Match", and the scout keeps a Recommended list. Despite the label, neither comes from an AI model.
Both come from fixed rules applied to the firm's search profile:
- Keywords that appear in the tender.
- Sector of the buyer or the work.
- Province where the work is.
- Value of the tender, where it is known.
Because the rules are fixed, the score is predictable. The same tender against the same profile always scores the same way, and a partner can understand why a tender did or did not appear on the Recommended list by reading the profile.
A high score is not advice to bid. It says only that the tender resembles what the profile describes. Whether the firm can meet the requirements, has people free in the delivery window and can price the work sensibly is a separate question, answered by a person at the bid/no-bid stage.
Tuning the search profile
The quality of the Recommended list depends almost entirely on the search profile. A few habits help:
- Use the words buyers actually use, not the firm's marketing language. "Financial statements compilation" may find what "accounting excellence" never will.
- Add synonyms and abbreviations that appear in public-sector notices.
- Keep provinces to those the firm can genuinely serve.
- Review the profile after each missed opportunity: if a relevant tender scored low, ask which rule missed it.
Menu entries and settings that do not do what they say
Three tender menu entries are misleading:
| Menu entry | What it actually shows |
|---|---|
| Procurement Plans | Always empty |
| Sources Registry | The full tender list |
| Awaiting Documents | The same tenders as Submission Due |
Several Tender Settings tabs save values that nothing in Achekam reads. The most important example is the bid partner-approval threshold. The settings show a default of R1,000,000, but the code ignores it: the threshold that applies is fixed in code at R5 million, whatever the settings say. A bid/no-bid decision on a tender of that size or more must name an active partner as approver. The decision itself is covered in bid or no-bid decisions.
Until those settings are wired up, treat the Tender Settings screen as unreliable and do not change your internal policies on the strength of a value saved there.
A morning routine for the scout
- Open Tender Intelligence and read the Recommended list first, then skim the rest.
- For each RSS tender, check the real closing date in the documents.
- Check the portals of sources shown as not connected, and enter relevant tenders by hand.
- Pass promising tenders to the bid manager for a bid/no-bid decision.
- Once a week, review the search profile against tenders the firm noticed but the scout scored low.
Once a tender is worth pursuing, the next steps are reading its requirements and pricing the bid; see tender requirements and response drafts and pricing a bid from the rate card.
Spend a week running the scout beside your current manual check. Where the two lists differ, the difference tells you exactly which keywords to add to the profile.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
