BidRadar

Methodology & data quality

Sources

BidRadar reads official government procurement pages directly — never a reseller's copy. It currently monitors 19 Tennessee sources; the coverage page lists every one, when it was last checked, and which sources we know about but cannot open yet.

How a listing becomes a record

Each source is checked on a schedule. When we find a solicitation, we keep a permanent copy of the page exactly as it appeared, then read it into a consistent record: title, issuing agency, solicitation number, and closing date. If the same solicitation appears again unchanged, we leave it alone. If its deadline or status changes, we keep the old version alongside the new one, so nothing quietly changes underneath you.

Deadlines are resolved in the issuing agency's own time zone — Tennessee spans Central and Eastern, and each source is configured with the zone its agency uses. When a posted deadline is genuinely ambiguous, or the agency writes something like "upon contract", we keep the agency's words and mark the date unknown instead of guessing, because a guessed deadline is worse than no deadline.

Every industry, matched by what you tell us

We collect everything a monitored source posts, whatever the industry — paving, roofing, catering, software, ambulance billing, golf carts. Matching to your business works on the keywords and the places you give us, so it applies to any line of work. On top of that, records are sorted into categories using published rules rather than an AI model, which means a category is explainable: we can show you which words in the posting drove it. Those automatic categories currently cover HVAC and mechanical work and are being extended; until yours exists, keyword matching is the tool.

Where a solicitation document is fetched, we also read out the requirements that decide whether you can bid at all — a mandatory pre-bid meeting, a bid bond, a licence classification — and show each one with the sentence it came from.

What we are tracking right now

89 solicitations from the sources above. Agencies post in bursts, so this number moves with what they publish.

What we will and will not show you

A solicitation only appears in search once it has a title, an issuing agency, a working link back to the agency's own posting, and a deadline that is either resolved or explicitly marked unknown. Anything that fails those checks is held back rather than shown to you half-complete. Records that close or get withdrawn are marked, not deleted, so a link you saved keeps working.

Every record links to the issuing agency's original posting, and that posting always governs. BidRadar is how you find the work; the agency's own documents are the authority on it.