BidRadar journey guide
Follow Harrow & Vale’s tender radar (example organisation)
This guide walks the full BidRadar path using one illustrative story — not a customer case study. Harrow & Vale Building Services is a fictional regional M&E and facilities contractor that bids on roughly 15–20 UK public-sector contracts a quarter with a bid team of three. Before BidRadar, someone checked two separate portals by hand and still missed things. You’ll see what each stage is for, why it exists, and how this example team acts at each step — the same journey you’ll take with your own register.
Harrow & Vale is an illustrative example — not a BidRadar customer. In the story, they deliver M&E and facilities contracts for local authorities, NHS trusts and housing associations across three counties.
Before BidRadar, someone on the team manually re-checked Find a Tender and Contracts Finder every Monday, judged relevance by eye, and let the odd promising notice slip past simply because it never got a second look. The team didn’t want a full CRM overhaul — they wanted a shared register they could refresh on demand, and know exactly which live UK tenders were worth their time.
→ Meet the team
Nadia
Runs sync when the register needs refreshing; works the scored list.
Femi
Owns pipeline decisions and handoff.
Priti
Owns capabilities, CPV filters, and the value ceiling.
→ The big metaphor: a scored register, not a search alert
A saved search tells you a notice exists. It cannot tell you whether it's worth fifteen minutes of a bid manager's morning. BidRadar gives every synced notice a real position — new, scored, marked, interested, bidding, dismissed — and the position always tells you what to do next.
BidRadar stands alone as that register. TenderAI handoff is there when writers should pick up a qualified opportunity — without re-typing the notice.
Where every notice starts
Sync, relevance scoring and CPV filters decide what lands in front of you and how urgent it looks.
Where a decision gets made
Marked for review, Interested and Dismissed keep every call visible instead of forgotten in someone's head.
Where a qualified tender leaves BidRadar
Send to CRM is optional — when you use TenderAI or Foundry CRM, qualified work moves on without re-typing the notice.
Where the rules everything else reads live
Capabilities, CPV codes and the value ceiling decide what the Radar even shows you.
Sign in, then read the register as three views
Every screen in BidRadar sits inside the same shell. The Radar itself has three views — Radar (new, unresolved), Pipeline (marked or interested) and Closed (sent to CRM, dismissed or expired) — plus Settings for the workspace itself. A capabilities profile, CPV filters and a value ceiling all live in Settings, and everything the Radar shows is filtered and scored against them.
The Radar is the first thing you see after sign-in, on purpose — it's the view you can act on immediately, sorted so the highest-scoring notices surface first.
Before trusting the score on any notice, confirm the capabilities profile, CPV codes and max value are actually set to your business — an empty profile scores nothing meaningfully.
Radar and Pipeline are both places a tender sits before a final decision. Closed is the record of decisions already made. Settings is neither — it's the configuration both views read, so a busy triage never confuses "needs my attention" with "already handled."
One button, two public sources
You run it when you need a fresh register. Sync pulls live, active tender-stage notices from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. No API key required. Looks back 90 days by default. Upserts by notice id against your CPV codes and value ceiling. Cancel anytime; what’s already landed is kept.
Nadia runs Sync live tenders when the register needs refreshing (in this example, she usually does it Monday morning). Sync is on demand — BidRadar doesn’t force a daily job. The button holds its width the whole time and shows elapsed seconds in the status line next to it — no ambiguity about whether it’s still working.
1 Run it, and let it run
The button keeps its label and width throughout — it never swaps to an ellipsis, which would resize the row it's sitting in.
Cancel tears down both the request and the server call. Tenders already imported before you cancelled stay on the Radar; the run history shows "cancelled" with the count it reached, never an error.
Every notice that clears sync is scored the moment it lands — see Relevance scoring.
A score that adds up to what it claims
Every notice gets a 0–100% relevance score against your capabilities profile — weighted 50% services, 30% case studies, 20% preferred budget, renormalised if any dimension is missing. The figures on screen are the actual weights the scorer used, never a number invented to fill a chart.
- Relevance depends on whoever happened to read it
- A strong match and a weak one look identical in a list
- No way to explain why a tender scored the way it did
- Every notice carries a computed 0–100% score
- The score decomposition shows each dimension's contribution
- If a dimension can't be scored, it's left out — not guessed
Nadia works top-down by score after each sync — a 40% match at the bottom of the list is rarely worth the same attention as an 86% one at the top.
What even reaches the Radar
CPV filters decide which notices sync pulls in at all — a parent code automatically matches its child codes, so you configure a category once instead of every sub-code under it. A max contract value (£5,000,000 by default) keeps oversized framework notices off the register entirely.
Priti set Harrow & Vale's CPV codes and £5M ceiling once. Every sync since then only ever imports notices worth someone's time — the filters do the excluding before anyone has to.
A decision that's held on the record
Every notice moves New → Marked for review → Interested, or exits sideways to Dismissed. Femi, Harrow & Vale's bid manager, works the Pipeline view — everything that's already had a first pass and needs a real decision.
Femi reviews everything Nadia marked during her triage pass, assigns the strongest ones to whoever will write the proposal, and marks them Interested before Friday's bid/no-bid meeting.
An Interested tender with no assignee is exactly as stuck as an unread one — assigning it is part of the same decision.
A "no" that stays a "no"
Dismissed is a real, recorded decision — not a deletion. Because every sync upserts by the tender's external id, a notice you've already dismissed can never resurface next week as if nobody had looked at it.
Dismissed means someone made a call. Expired means the deadline simply passed with no decision. Mixing the two would hide which "no" was a judgement and which was a missed window.
Femi dismisses out-of-region notices without a second thought — the record stays in Closed, so nobody has to re-litigate the same tender in a month.
The one screen built for reading, not scanning
Opening a notice moves you from ledger to document: a brief with the full description and external links, a workflow panel for status and notes, and a read-only rail with match, value, deadline and CPV codes.
The Radar is a ledger you scan; a single notice is a document you read. The brief gets the reading column, the workflow keeps its own space so it never hides behind a long description, and the rail stays read-only so nothing there can disturb tab order.
Interested becomes Bidding, and the bid team already has it
Send to CRM sets status to Bidding in BidRadar (shown in amber) — the moment the handoff succeeds, the opportunity has left the decision loop. It posts the opportunity to TenderAI’s Triage column when TenderAI is connected. If Foundry CRM is configured, the same action can pin a deal there too. BidRadar doesn’t require TenderAI to be useful as a triage register. Retries are idempotent on the tender’s external id, so a second click can never create a duplicate.
Femi sends every tender the team decided to bid on. When they use TenderAI, it lands in Triage without anyone re-typing buyer, value, or notice ID.
Status flips to Bidding the moment the handoff succeeds — it's the one status that means "this has left BidRadar's decision loop and is now live work elsewhere."
What the score is actually measured against
The capabilities profile holds your services, case studies and preferred budget range — the three dimensions the relevance score weighs 50/30/20. Updating it rescores every open opportunity immediately, not just future syncs.
You've now walked every stage BidRadar has. See it as one path in the full checklist, or jump straight back to whatever you use weekly.
Who a tender can be assigned to
Team members is the list assignees are drawn from across the Radar and Pipeline. It sits in Settings alongside CPV filters and the max value ceiling — configuration, not day-to-day queue work.
Priti added Nadia and Femi as team members once, when the workspace was set up. She revisits CPV filters and the value ceiling roughly once a quarter, when the business takes on a new service line.
Harrow & Vale, end to end (illustrative)
Every stage of the journey, in the order a tender actually moves through it — for this example team. Your own cadence can be Monday, midweek, or whenever the register needs a refresh.
- 1Run Sync live tenders — on demand, when you need a fresh register from both UK public sources.
- 2Let CPV and value filters do the excluding before anything reaches the Radar.
- 3Sort the Radar by relevance score and open the highest matches first.
- 4Mark for review or Dismiss — a decision is either kept moving or filed, never lost.
- 5Open the detail screen to read the brief and check the facts rail before deciding.
- 6Mark Interested and assign whoever will own writing the bid.
- 7Send to CRM — sets status to Bidding in BidRadar; optionally posts to TenderAI Triage (and Foundry CRM if configured).
- 8Keep the capabilities profile current so every score stays honest.
- 9Review team and CPV setup only when the business itself changes.
Frequently asked
Is Harrow & Vale a real customer?
No. Harrow & Vale Building Services (and Nadia, Femi, and Priti) are an illustrative example used only in this guide to show how BidRadar fits together.
Does BidRadar sync automatically every day?
No. You run sync on demand when you need a fresh register.
Does BidRadar cover tenders outside the UK?
No. It syncs specifically from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, both UK public sector notice sources.
What's the difference between Radar, Pipeline and Closed?
Radar holds new, unresolved notices. Pipeline holds anything marked for review or Interested. Closed holds anything sent to CRM, dismissed or expired — the same table, three different slices of status.
Can a dismissed tender come back?
Only if it's genuinely re-published as a new notice. Sync upserts by external id, so the same notice you dismissed stays dismissed on every future sync.
What happens when I click Send to CRM?
Status moves to Bidding in BidRadar the moment the handoff succeeds. If TenderAI is connected, the opportunity is posted to its Triage column; if Foundry CRM is configured, the same action can push a pinned deal there too. Retries are safe — nothing duplicates.
Can I cancel a sync that's taking too long?
Yes. Cancel tears down the request and the upstream call. Tenders already found are kept, and the run is recorded as cancelled rather than failed.
Where does the relevance score come from?
Your capabilities profile — services, case studies and preferred budget, weighted 50/30/20. Updating the profile rescores every open opportunity right away.