Urgent bid support · situation 10 of 12
The submission is written but the portal will not cooperate
Portals end more bids than poor writing does, and almost all of it is avoidable by submitting a day early. The failures cluster: registration not yet approved, file size or format rejected, a mandatory field nobody noticed, and the final confirm step that suppliers miss so a document sits uploaded but not submitted. If you are inside the final hours, work through those four before anything else, because they are the ones that are still fixable.
The honest bit
The deadline will almost certainly stand. Authorities are constrained in how far they can extend without affecting fairness between bidders, and a supplier whose upload failed at five to three will usually be told they should have submitted earlier. That is harsh and it is also the reality, which is why the real answer to portal problems is a submission buffer rather than a support number.
What we need to start today
- Which portal, and the error you are seeing verbatim
- How long until the deadline
- Whether your registration is approved or still pending
- Who holds the account and whether that person can submit, which is not always the same person
- The files you are trying to upload, with their sizes and formats
When we will tell you not to bid
These are the things that make the situation undeliverable rather than merely tight. If any of them apply we will say so on the first call, before you spend anything.
- Registration still pending, which is the one thing no amount of urgency accelerates
- The account holder unavailable, where credentials cannot be reissued in time
- Files that breach a stated limit with no time to rework them
- Assuming upload equals submission, where a final confirm step was never completed
Questions people ask at this point
The portal crashed before the deadline. Will they extend it?
Usually not. Authorities are limited in how far they can extend without affecting fairness between bidders. Raise it immediately and in writing, because a documented platform-wide outage is the one case that sometimes gets accommodated, but do not plan around it.
I uploaded everything but it says not submitted. What happened?
Most portals separate uploading from submitting, with a final confirmation step that is easy to miss. A document that is uploaded but not confirmed is not a submission. Check for a submit or confirm action and complete it.
How early should I submit?
A full day ahead. Suppliers who bid regularly do this as standard, because portals fail at the deadline when every bidder in the country is uploading at once.
Tell us the deadline and we will tell you if it is doable
We respond the same day. Send the documents and the deadline and you will get a straight answer on whether it is deliverable, including if the answer is no. A bid you were never going to win costs more than the fee it would have earned.
Send us the deadline
Portal problems. Tell us the closing date and what you have, and we will come back the same day with whether it is deliverable.
Other situations we pick up
- A tender is due this week and nothing is written
- A private sector RFP has landed with a short deadline
- Your bid writer has dropped out mid-submission
- A framework application closes this week and you have not started
- You need to get onto a Dynamic Purchasing System quickly
- An ITT has arrived and you have no bid team