A tender portal's default view is not a pipeline. It is every notice the authority published this week, sorted by the date it went up, in categories the buyer chose rather than the ones you work in. Reading it end to end is an afternoon, and most of that afternoon is spent on contracts in the wrong trade, below the value where bidding pays, or closing on Thursday.
Three filters remove almost all of it.
Open the free tender shortlist tool
This is the filter that quietly loses work. Public buyers write their own titles and pick their own category labels, so the same job is roofing at one authority, roof repair at the next, and reroof at the third. A one-word search finds a third of your market and tells you the market is thin.
The fix is to filter on a comma-separated list of the words your trade actually goes by — roofing, roof repair, reroof — and match a row if any of them appears in its category or its title. It stays a plain substring match rather than a synonym dictionary, so a spelling you did not think of is still missed. Adding one when you notice it costs nothing.
Every bid costs roughly the same to assemble whether the contract is $12,000 or $120,000: the same bonds, the same insurance evidence, the same declarations, the same day of estimating. Below some value that effort cannot be recovered even by winning. Set that floor explicitly and let the filter enforce it, rather than deciding case by case at the end of a long list when the marginal notice always looks tempting.
Sort what is left by deadline and read from the top. A contract you would win, closing in three days, with a bond you do not yet have, is not an opportunity — and it is much easier to see that when the shortlist is ordered by the clock rather than by publication date.
A roofing contractor filters an export on roofing, roof repair, reroof with a minimum value of 20,000. A school roof replacement and a clinic reroof survive. A $12,000 painting hall — which the portal had filed under a category the contractor's single-word search would also have matched — drops out on value. Two listings to read properly, in deadline order, instead of ninety.
The tool filters a CSV you export yourself (title, buyer, deadline, category, value, url), entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. It does not connect to portals, monitor them, submit bids, or offer eligibility advice — verify every listing, requirement, deadline, and declaration at the original source before acting. Once you have a shortlist, the bid readiness checker covers the paperwork go/no-go on each one.
Export the notices from the portal you already have access to, then filter them on three things before reading any of them: whether the trade matches what you do, whether the contract value clears the floor below which the bid effort is not worth it, and whether the deadline leaves enough runway to assemble a compliant submission. What survives all three is a shortlist worth an afternoon; the rest is a portal's default view, which is not a pipeline.
Public buyers write their own titles and pick their own categories, so the same work appears as 'roofing', 'roof repair', and 'reroof' across three notices from three authorities. A single-word filter silently drops the other two. Filtering on a comma-separated list of the words your trade is actually called catches all of them in one pass — but it is a plain substring match, not a synonym dictionary, so a spelling you did not list is still missed.
No. It filters a CSV you export yourself, entirely in your browser, and nothing is uploaded. It does not connect to portals, submit bids, or judge whether you are eligible. Verify every listing, requirement, deadline, and declaration against the original source before acting on it.