Data sources and method

Source

All tender information comes from the National Treasury eTenders Portal and its open data. National Treasury licenses the data for any purpose, including commercial use, publication and re-publication, provided a link to the original source remains intact. National Treasury does not guarantee the accuracy of the data and is not responsible for decisions based on it.

What is included

• Tenders open on the eTenders Portal at the last collection (20 October 2026, 17:30 SAST). Collection runs several times a day.
• Award letters, regret letters, bidder lists, validity extensions and cancellations that buyers post as if they were tenders are left out, because nobody can bid on them.
• Tenders whose compulsory briefing has passed are marked, and left out of the tender lists, because only businesses that attended can bid.

How the requirements are read

• Tender documents are downloaded from the portal. Scanned pages are converted to text.
• A language model reads the pages most likely to contain the requirements and must quote the exact words and page for every answer.
• Each quote is checked against the document. Anything that can't be found there is discarded and shown as "check the document". Lists that don't add up, such as preference points that don't total 20 or 10, are also discarded rather than shown incomplete.
• Personal contact details of officials are removed before anything is published.

How accurate it is

The reader is tested against tender documents checked by hand. On the latest test of 20 tenders it hadn't been tuned on, 92% of checked items were right, 8% were marked "check the document", and none were confidently wrong. That is a small sample and real documents vary, which is why every item shows its source page and the official documents always take precedence.