Manage a tender

Once created, the tender is managed from its detail, organized into tabs: General, Items, Documents, Suppliers, Q&A, Evaluators, Comparison, Logbook and Activity. At the top you see the status, the type, the Q&A visibility and the phase line (Draft → Published → Under evaluation → Awarded).

Publish

While it's a draft, no one sees it. To publish it, the only prerequisite is to have at least one invited supplier. When you publish: the status changes to Published, the publication date is set, the schedule starts, and the invited suppliers receive the email with access to the portal.

Suppliers

• Invite more suppliers at any time, choosing which contacts to notify (same as during creation).

• Suggest with AI: you turn on this option and the system proposes relevant suppliers with an affinity score.

• Resend invitation to a supplier (adjusting contacts and whether the primary email is notified) and copy the portal link to send it through another channel.

• Each invitation shows its status: invited, viewed, proposal submitted or declined.

Question period (Q&A)

• Bidders send questions from their portal. Depending on the configuration, the Q&A is public (everyone sees questions and answers, though anonymously: bidders don't see who asked each question) or private (each one sees only their own).

• You answer from the Q&A tab and you can attach files to the answer. When you answer, the supplier is notified.

• Technical questions can be routed to the evaluators, who return a draft answer. The buyer reviews and publishes it, or returns it with feedback to be corrected.

Circulars

To communicate clarifications, scope changes or extensions, send a circular: you enter a subject and body, choose the recipients among the invited suppliers, and it's recorded in the case history. Suppliers see it in their portal. When you edit a date or relevant detail of an already-published tender, the system offers to notify the change via circular.

Automatic reminders and follow-ups

The platform takes care of following up for you. Automatically (by email and notification in the portal):

• Upcoming closing notice: to all invited suppliers (that haven't declined), about 24 to 48 hours before each closing (the question period and the offer reception), once per tender.

• Follow-up to those who didn't participate: invited suppliers who haven't submitted their proposal yet receive up to two reminders. The first one halfway between the invitation and the closing, and the second one near the closing as a last notice. If the supplier submits their proposal, the reminders stop.

Reminders to evaluators and notices to the buyer are not automatic: technical questions are routed to the evaluators when you decide.

Edit a published tender

With edit mode enabled you can adjust, once published, the title, description and dates (inline editing with autosave). The tender type, the Q&A visibility, the proposal mode and the criteria are locked, and can only be changed while it's a draft. The items can be edited: see below. Dates can only be extended forward.

• Extend deadlines: an assistant lets you move the question, offer or evaluation closing, with a reason and choosing which suppliers to notify (notifying everyone is not always the right call). The available options depend on the phase: once reception is closed (tender Under Evaluation) the only deadline you can extend is the offer closing, and doing so reopens reception — the tender goes back to Offers Open with the new deadline, on the same round, without using up one of the three, without touching the invitations and without discarding the offers already received.

• Documents: you can add specification documents after publishing (and notify via circular).

Editing items with the tender published

Also, while the tender is published (during Q&A or receiving offers, before evaluation), from the Items tab you can use Edit items to add, change quantities, units, target prices or specifications, and cancel items (they can be restored later). Changes are confirmed together in one step.

On confirming, Sourced:

• Returns to draft any proposals already sent in the current round, so each supplier reviews and resends them with the new items.

• If you're in round 2 or 3, suppliers who had marked "keep previous offer" lose that mark: their old offer can no longer stand with different items. Closed rounds are not touched.

• Sends an automatic circular to the participants in the round with the details of the changes and the reason you entered. All are selected by default; you can untick some before confirming.

• Logs the change in the tender's activity, which also appears in the package.

You can't cancel the last active item, or edit items once the offer deadline has passed (extend it first), in evaluation or after awarding.

Offer reception

• Suppliers enter prices per item, terms, technical/commercial notes and the required documentation from the portal. They can quote partially.

• A submitted proposal can still be corrected until the offer deadline: the supplier edits it in the portal and submits again, and the new version replaces the previous one (any evaluation already run on it is discarded and has to be run again). Once the deadline has passed no proposal can be modified. To allow improvements there are two ways: reopen reception by extending the offer closing —proposals become editable again until the new deadline, without using up a round— or open a new round.

• In sealed bid, proposals aren't visible until reception closes.

Comparison and evaluation

At closing, the tender moves to Under evaluation. In the Comparison tab you see the ranking of offers, the scores and the documents of each proposal, and from there the AI evaluation is triggered and the evaluators' scores are consolidated. That whole flow (sending to evaluators, scorecard and AI evaluation) is detailed in Proposal evaluation.

Award

You choose the winning supplier and award. The winning proposal becomes accepted, the rest rejected, the tender moves to Awarded and the purchase order is generated. If you need another round (for example, to negotiate), you can open a new round (up to three).

Other actions

• Cancel: ends the process and notifies the invited suppliers.

• Activity: the audit tab records each action (who, what, when, previous and new value).

• Download package: you download the whole tender and its proposals in a ZIP.

Logbook

The Logbook tab is the team's internal record of the process: leave a note after an in-person meeting, a phone call with a supplier or a verbal agreement, with file attachments if needed. That way the whole team has the context in one place.

• Notes are internal only: suppliers never see them.

• You can edit your own notes (they get flagged as "edited") and delete them; the organization admin can also delete other people's notes.

Public tender and shareable link

When you mark a tender as public, Sourced generates a link using your company's supplier portal address. Anyone who opens that link sees the tender's title, code, description, status, and dates. Nothing else: not the items, not the documents, not the list of invited suppliers.

• Requirement: your company needs to have the supplier portal set up. If it doesn't, the switch appears disabled with the reason.
• Where: when creating the tender, in the General step ("Public tender"). Afterward, in the tender detail, in the "Public tender" card — it starts collapsed, click its title to open it; when the link is on, the header shows an "Active" chip. The "Copy public link" button is there too.
• Publishing without invitees: a public tender can be published even if you haven't invited any suppliers; suppliers arrive through the link.
• Who can join: any supplier who opens the link and signs in (or creates an account) is enrolled instantly, as if you had invited them. They show up in the invitee list with the "Public link" tag.
• Turning it off and on: if you turn off "Public tender", the link stops working. If you turn it back on, the same link works again.
• Closed tender: the link keeps showing the tender and its status, but without the join button.
• Removed supplier: if you removed a supplier from the tender, they can't get back in through the link. If you want them to join, reactivate them from the invitee list.

Private messages

Besides the Q&A questions, you can open a 1:1 private message channel with each supplier: even when the tender's Q&A is public, these messages stay invisible to the other bidders.

Starting a conversation

• From the Q&A tab, using the New message button.
• From the supplier's row, using the message button.

The first time you write to a supplier, they get an email with a link to their portal to view and reply to the message. When they reply, you get an in-app and email notification.

Keep in mind that targeted circulars (sent to specific suppliers) are now visible only to their recipients in the portal; general circulars are still visible to every bidder.

Currencies and exchange rate in an agreement tender's comparison

When a tender is meant to create or renew a commercial agreement, the Comparison tab builds the consumption-weighted basket and compares every supplier on price, even if one of them quotes in a different currency: it no longer gets left out of the comparison for that.

Above the price matrix, the header states “Compared in {currency}” and where that currency comes from: first the tender's own currency (if it has one), then your organization's default currency, then the currency used most across the loaded offers and, if no offer declared a currency, “No comparison currency” — in that case amounts are compared exactly as each supplier entered them, with no conversion.

Below the header, one line per currency other than the comparison one shows the rate used (“1 {currency} = {rate} {base currency}”) and its source: BNA (Banco de la Nación Argentina), BCRA, BCB (Brazil), BANREP (Colombia), BCRP (Peru), or a fallback source when the central bank does not respond. If exchange rates could not be fetched, a notice says so and no amount can be ranked by price.

Every price and amount in the matrix is shown already converted to the comparison currency, with the original amount and its own currency visible next to it (or on hover). If a supplier quotes items in several currencies, their weighted basket also breaks down by currency: pesos and dollars are never added into a single number.

A cell can show “Not comparable” instead of an amount. The possible reasons (shared by every comparison in the platform):

• No currency declared: the supplier entered a price without saying which currency it is in.
• Exchange rate missing: the currency is valid, but its rate against the comparison currency could not be obtained.
• No comparison currency: no offer declared a currency and there is also no tender or organization currency to compare against.
• Nothing quoted: the supplier entered no price for any item in that basket.
• Unsupported currency, amount never converted and assumed currency, not declared: edge cases where the system could not confidently convert a specific amount.

Two currencies are never assumed to be worth the same: when there is nothing to convert with, the cell is marked not comparable instead of being added in anyway.

When awarding to the catalog, the per-supplier summary is just as honest about currencies: if you awarded items from the same supplier in different currencies and not all of them can be converted to the comparison currency, that supplier's total shows “Not comparable” instead of a made-up sum, and it notes when the supplier “Quotes in several currencies”.

The tender stores the exchange rate (rate, date and source for each currency) it was decided with when awarded. If a purchase order is generated from it, its approval flow uses that same snapshot, not the rate from the day it gets approved.

Awarding an agreement tender to the catalog

In a tender whose purpose is to create or renew a commercial agreement, the Comparison tab has the Award to catalog button instead of the regular award. The award is per item: you pick the winning supplier for each one, or Do not award and that item is left unawarded (before confirming you're told how many items would remain unawarded). That creates one agreement per supplier, with the items and prices they won. This award generates no purchase order: what you get is the catalog, loaded.

In the same modal you set the validity (from/to) of the agreements to be created and, if you want, an adjustment clause: no clause, periodic requote, or index-based adjustment, with the period in months and the index name. That's the clause that later triggers the price update request to the supplier on its own.

On confirmation, each winning supplier ends up with its new agreement in the catalog (the success notice takes you straight there with View agreement), the winning proposals become accepted, the rest are rejected and the suppliers that didn't win are notified. The tender moves to awarded and can't be awarded twice.

The tender also stores the exchange rate snapshot the decision was made with (rate, date and source for each currency). From then on, that tender's comparison keeps showing those rates, not the ones from the day you open it.