What this is for
The Opportunities screen is where you find public contracts worth bidding for and decide which ones fit your organisation. It is the first step in the find, assess and win journey. You reach it from the Velstrian Bid menu. A tender is a formal invitation from a buyer asking suppliers to bid for a piece of work.
Where the tenders come from
The feed shows live United Kingdom tenders from three public sources: the Find a Tender Service, Contracts Finder, and Public Contracts Scotland. These are the official government channels where public bodies, such as councils, NHS trusts and government departments, must advertise work. There is also an optional SAM.gov source for United States federal opportunities. It uses your own SAM.gov key and has a daily limit, so you turn it on with its source chip, and its results appear in a section of their own that is not scored for relevance.
Step by step
- Open Opportunities from the Velstrian Bid menu.
- Type what you do into the single search bar at the top, for example "grounds maintenance" or "IT support".
- Use the source chips beside the search bar to turn a source on or off.
- Read the ranked list. Each result has a relevance score that compares the tender's sector and region with the bids you have recorded, plus its value, so the closest fits sit at the top. Set up tender fit on the same screen and every tender is also scored against what you tell us you bid for.
- Save a search so new matching tenders are kept for you. Only a team member who can edit data sees the create and delete controls for saved searches. A viewer sees saved searches but cannot change them.
Assessing a tender before you commit
Opening a result shows the buyer, the contract value, the closing date and the published documents. Use the match position and the deadline together: a strong match with enough time to write a proper response is a better use of your week than a weak match closing in two days. When you decide to go ahead, start a bid from the opportunity and the tender details carry across, so you do not retype them.
What happens next
Starting a bid creates a contract workspace where you upload the tender pack, break it into questions and draft your answers. See the end to end bid workflow guide for the full path from here to a finished submission.
Common problems
Nothing in the feed, or no relevance score: widen your search words, and set up tender fit with the sectors you actually work in, because relevance reads your recorded bids and your tender fit. The private sector note: if your organisation only wins private work, a short note above the feed explains that every source here is a public procurement channel and how private work reaches you instead. If the whole screen sends you back to the Velstrian Bid home, your subscription may be suspended or unpaid, and the home screen shows how to put that right.