Where our tender data comes from

ProTenders is a search and alerting layer over public procurement data. We do not create tenders and we are not a government agency. This page sets out exactly what we pull, how often, what is published as-is, what we calculate, and how to tell us we have something wrong.

Sources and refresh cadence

What is published as-is, and what we calculate

The distinction matters when you are deciding whether to bid, so we keep it explicit rather than blending the two.

Taken directly from the source

• Tender title, reference number, buyer, province, category, closing date and status, exactly as published in the OCDS feed.
• Award values and supplier names, as published in award notices.
• Departmental payment totals recorded against a supplier name, as published in Treasury BAS. These are payments made by a department, not a supplier’s revenue.

Derived or generated by us

• Readable tender titles. Many source titles are only a reference code (for example “Scm11/2026/27”), so we generate a descriptive title from the notice body. The original reference is always shown alongside it.
• Category mapping. OCDS categories are mapped onto UNSPSC commodity families so tenders and historic spend can be compared. Mapping is rules-based and occasionally imperfect.
• Estimated values, opportunity scores and competition measures under Intelligence. These are calculated from historic BAS data, not quoted from the tender document.
• Market narratives on Intelligence pages, which are generated from the underlying figures. Generated narratives describe what the records show. They do not characterise a named business, rank it as a competitor, or draw conclusions about its relationships with any department — an automated check blocks those before publication.
• Counts of fiscal years, departments and provinces on a supplier page. These count what appears in the extract we hold, which is not the same as a business’s trading history.

Limitations worth knowing

• We inherit source gaps. If a buyer does not publish a notice to eTenders, it will not appear here. Some institutions publish inconsistently or late.
• Closed tenders stay online. Expired notices remain readable because they are useful for researching what a department buys and at what value. The closing date is always shown, and structured data marks them as no longer available.
• Always verify against the source document. Before you submit a bid, check the tender document and the buyer's own portal. We link to the source on every tender page.
• Intelligence figures are estimates. Market sizes and opportunity scores are modelled from historic spend. They are there to help you prioritise, not to price a bid.
• Departmental spend is not supplier revenue. BAS records what a department paid out against a supplier name. That is not the supplier's revenue, turnover, profit or contract value, and we do not describe it as any of those.
• A supplier name is not a company. BAS identifies suppliers by free-text name, with no registration number. A name in the dataset may not correspond to the company of the same or a similar name, and one company can appear under several spellings. Where we can see a second spelling we show it separately rather than adding it in, because combining them would be a claim about corporate identity the data cannot support.
• Our extract is a slice, not the whole record. We hold the fiscal years we have imported, and the import can be incomplete or out of date. Absence from our copy is not evidence that something never happened, and we do not present a figure as a lifetime or complete total.

Corrections

If a tender is mislabelled, a value looks wrong, or a page shows something that does not match the source notice, tell us and we will fix it. Include the tender reference number or the page URL.

Email support@protenders.co.za or use the contact form. Corrections that come from the source feed are picked up automatically on the next sync; anything we have derived we correct by hand.

If we publish figures about your business

Supplier pages name real businesses and attach public payment records to them. If something we publish about yours is wrong, or the records are not yours at all, use the data correction route. You do not need a lawyer, and you do not need to disclose anything confidential about your contracts.

We re-query the National Treasury source for the name on the page and for other spellings of it. If our copy differs from the source, we correct our copy rather than argue the figure with you. If we cannot establish from the source that the records belong to your business, we take the page down and de-index it — the source identifies suppliers by name only, so that is often the honest answer. We keep the underlying records either way, so what was published stays auditable, but we stop republishing them.

Editorial guides

Our written guides (CIDB grading, CSD registration, B-BBEE requirements, how to price a bid) are produced by the ProTenders procurement desk and are based on the published rules of the relevant authority. Where a rule comes from a specific body, we name and link it.

Guides are general information about public procurement process. They are not legal, financial or tax advice, and requirements change. For a decision that carries real money, check the current rule with the issuing authority.

Further reading: about ProTenders, how we differ from eTenders.gov.za, and the procurement glossary.

Page maintained by the ProTenders procurement desk. Last reviewed October 2026. Canonical URL: https://www.protenders.co.za/methodology