Filtering and refining your tender search: from the full volume to a search profile

Why a filter pays off

87,725 EU-wide calls for competition in twelve months for Germany alone: that is around 350 per working day. The art lies in reliably filtering out the five relevant ones per week.

The four filter levels

Service: combine keywords and CPV codes, never just one of the two. Keywords include synonyms and spelling variants, such as maintenance cleaning, building cleaning and cleaning services.

Region: place of performance instead of the location of the contracting authority. A Berlin ministry also tenders services in Bavaria. Most portals filter by NUTS regions, the EU's territorial units ranging from federal state to district.

Size: set lower and upper limits for the contract value. Procedures ten times the size of your annual turnover only cost reading time, unless individual lots fit. Then it is worth considering a bidding consortium.

Time: for a sound first bid you usually need at least ten days of remaining time before the deadline. A deadline window in the filter shows you exactly the results you can work on without rushing. The rules on deadlines are explained in the basics article.

From filter to search profile

A good search profile is a saved set of filters that runs automatically every day and reports new results, by email or in the tool of your choice. Review it weekly during the first month: too many irrelevant results means narrowing it, zero results means a net is missing.

The right filter width

Filter deliberately a little wider. Leaving room for unexpected results shows you how much the market actually offers and leaves the preselection to the assessment. Whether a result is worthwhile is not a question for the filter but a question for the assessment against your suitability and capacity.