Finding Public Bids (Solicitations)
Watch agency bid portals and government tender feeds for open bids that match what you sell, then turn any bid into a draft RFQ to your suppliers in one click.
Overview
Public agencies post thousands of open bids every week across their own portals and national tender feeds. Solicitations watches those sources for you and lists the open bids that match what you sell, right in the Bidding sidebar.
When a bid is worth chasing, click Pursue. Buyer24 reads the listing and its documents and drafts an RFQ to your suppliers, so you can price your bid. The quotes are due before the agency's deadline.
Buyer24 never bids for you. Pursue drafts an RFQ to your suppliers. Nothing is sent to them until you approve it, and nothing is ever sent to the agency. You submit your bid yourself, on the agency's portal.
Where it lives
| Where | What's there |
|---|---|
| Connections → Solicitation sources | The agencies, feeds and subscriptions your organization reads bids from, with each source's lists |
| Bidding in the app bar on the left | One item per list at the top of its sidebar, above Pursuits, with a badge for bids found by the last check |
| Solicitations in the Bidding sidebar | With two or more lists, they fold into a Solicitations group. Click the group name to see every list combined on one page |
| Organization → Country | Decides which national tender feeds are offered first |
Lists are shared across your organization. Every member sees every list in the Bidding sidebar.
Kinds of sources
The Solicitation sources section on Connections has three cards:
| Card | What it covers | Button |
|---|---|---|
| Agencies | About 1,000 cities, counties, school districts, transit and utility authorities, state agencies and other public buyers across the US and Canada, plus selected national portals | Add agency |
| Government tender feeds | National feeds: SAM.gov (US federal), TED (EU, above EU thresholds), Find a Tender (UK, above UK thresholds) and Contracts Finder (UK, lower-value, mainly England) | Add feed |
| Tender data subscriptions | Paid bid-data services you already subscribe to. Today: HigherGov (US federal, state and local), using your own API key and a saved search | Connect subscription |
Only Organization Admins can add, test, edit or disconnect sources. Everyone else sees the cards and lists read-only.
Adding a source and creating a list
1. Find the source
Click Add agency, Add feed or Connect subscription. The Add a solicitation source catalog opens.
- Search by agency, city, state or what they buy, or paste a link to an agency's bids page.
- Filter by Type of source, Location (country, state, metro area) and Agency type (Cities, Counties, Schools, Transit, Utilities, Purchasing cooperatives and more). Hide ones you've added keeps the catalog to new options.
- Preview what's open on any entry shows a few of its current open bids. Previewing saves nothing.
When your organization's country is set, sources covering that country come first.
2. Connect it
Click Add (or Connect for a subscription). The connect dialog has three steps:
- Permissions. What Buyer24 will read from the source. Click Accept and continue.
- Connect. For an agency, choose How should Buyer24 get its bids?: Read its bid portal, or From its notice emails (see Agencies that only send notice emails). Settings that come from the catalog are filled in for you. Click Connect, and Buyer24 checks the source once.
- What to look for. Create the source's first list (fields below).
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| List name | For example "Texas pole line hardware" |
| Looking for | Products or categories, comma-separated. Leave it empty to list every open bid from the source |
| States | Optional two-letter states, for feeds that cover a whole country |
| Check for new solicitations | Weekdays, every day, or Mondays, at 7:00 your time |
Click Create list. The list runs once straight away, appears in the Bidding sidebar and opens. Skip for now connects the source without a list.
Checks use no credits. Lists are checked and matched without AI.
More lists on one source
One source can feed several lists, for example one per product line. On the source's row under Connections, click + Create a list (or + next to its existing lists).
An agency that isn't in the catalog
Type the agency's name or paste a link to its bids page, then click Find online (or press Enter). Buyer24 looks for the agency's bid portal and shows its steps as it goes. Some agency sites are slow, so this can take up to a minute or two.
- Found: you see which platform the agency posts its bids on and a few sample bids. Click Continue to connect it as above.
- Not found: you can Get its bid notices by email instead, or Ask the setup agent. The agent reads the agency's page, works out how to read its bids and proposes a list. Nothing runs until you open the proposal and click Confirm and start. Asking the agent is an agent task and uses credits like any other. If an agency's bids sit behind a sign-in or a search form, the agent passes the agency to the Buyer24 team instead.
Agencies that only send notice emails
Some agencies announce bids by email to registered vendors. Connect them with From its notice emails. The source's row on Connections then shows its own forwarding address, under Forward notices to, with Copy address.
Register that address with the agency's vendor notices, or forward the agency's emails to it from your mailbox. Gmail asks you to confirm a new forwarding address; Buyer24 shows Gmail's confirmation code on the source's row.
Buyer24 reads each notice and adds its bids to your lists. Only bids announced after you set this up arrive. The row shows when the last notice came in.
Subscriptions
HigherGov needs your own HigherGov API key and a link to a saved search. Buyer24 reads the newest results of your saved search once a day, and those reads count toward your HigherGov plan's quota. The results stay inside your organization.
Working a list
Open a list from the Bidding sidebar. Each row shows the bid's number and title, the agency and department, the closing date and the days left, plus chips for quantity, the keywords it matched and conditions such as Bond required or Mandatory visit. A New tag marks bids found by the last check.
Lists show only bids that close more than two days from now, so there's time to get supplier quotes.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| All / New / Closing this week / In 1–2 weeks / Later | Narrow the list by closing date |
| Filter | Pick agencies, and Hide bids that need a bond, prevailing wage, a mandatory visit, approved products only, a set-aside or a term contract |
| View | Sort by best match, closing soonest, newest or agency, and Group by agency, department or closing date |
| Search | Search what the customer needs, an NSN, a part or solicitation number. Choose In this list, In my lists or All open solicitations |
| List settings | Rename the list, change what it looks for or its schedule, or Delete list. Deleting a list keeps its source connected |
| Check now | Re-check the list right away. The page shows when it was last checked |
| Open the listing | Opens the bid on the agency's site |
| Not interested | Hides the bid for everyone in your organization |
Matching goes by your keywords, every word of a multi-word keyword in any order, and by closeness in meaning. A bid can appear without an exact keyword hit when it is clearly about the same thing.
Sort, grouping and hidden conditions are remembered in your browser. In the sidebar, a list's ⋯ offers Rename and Remove from menu.
New-bid alerts
When a scheduled check finds new bids, the person who set up the list gets an alert in Buyer24 and by email, with a link to the list. The sidebar badge shows how many bids are new since the last check.
Pursue: from bid to draft RFQ
Click Pursue on a row. Buyer24 first checks the listing for its bid documents.
- Public documents are downloaded and read for you. A ✨ on the Pursue button means Buyer24 can fetch them itself.
- Documents behind the portal's vendor sign-in (📎 on the button) can't be fetched; Buyer24 never signs in to portals. The dialog lists the files and links to the listing. Download them, drop up to five files (25 MB each: PDF, Word, Excel or images) into the dialog and click Draft the RFQ, or click Draft without documents.
Buyer24 then reads the bid, its requirements and documents, drafts the RFQ and matches suppliers. You can close the dialog; the draft finishes in the background and appears in RFQs.
The draft RFQ contains:
- A subject and request written from the listing and its documents, with every item line carried over
- The bid documents attached
- A supplier quote deadline before the agency's: one day before the bid closes
- Up to five strong matches from your supplier pool, attached as recipients. When there are few or none, Find new suppliers starts supplier research, and only when you click it
- An Agency bid panel, for you only, linking to the agency's listing
- How to bid, a checklist for you, never sent to suppliers: when bids and questions are due, how to submit, the agency contact, pre-bid meeting, bonds, evaluation, what to submit with the bid and other conditions
Nothing is sent. Review the draft and send it under your organization's usual approval settings (see RFQ Autopilot & Reminders). The bid leaves your list once pursued, and pursuing it again opens the same RFQ. Pursue itself uses no credits.
Starting before you have an account
On the Start page, choose Find bids to quote and tell the assistant what you sell and which states you cover. It shows the public agencies likely to buy it: first the ones that recently posted bids like yours, then others in your states. Untick any you don't want and click Connect and start to create your free account.
You land on the list in your workspace. Check the agencies and click Confirm and start; from then on it works like any other list.
Asking in chat
- Your AI Assistant can answer questions about open bids, such as "what's open for LED street lights in Texas?", and read a bid's details. It can't connect sources or pursue bids.
- The setup agent can find and preview sources and propose a new list for you. You confirm the list before anything runs.
See Your AI Assistant and Agents & Plugins.
FAQ
Does it cost anything?
Checking lists, searching, alerts and Pursue use no credits. Asking the setup agent to set up an unknown agency, and Find new suppliers, are agent tasks and use credits. A HigherGov subscription is your own, paid to HigherGov.
Does Buyer24 submit my bid?
No. Pursue drafts an RFQ to your suppliers so you can price the bid. You submit the bid on the agency's portal.
Why is a bid closing tomorrow missing?
Lists leave out bids closing within two days, since there's no time left to get supplier quotes.
I disconnected a source. What happened to its lists?
Lists that read only that source are removed. Lists that also read other sources keep working.
Related
- Connections & Connected Stores: everything your organization connects
- Setting Up Your Organization: your organization's country
- Sending Your First RFQ: what happens after Pursue drafts the RFQ
- Alerts & Notifications