Opportunities

Status. Commonwealth approaches to market, planned procurement, standing offers and GrantConnect grant opportunities are loaded, and so are the state records each publisher has released.

Opportunities is sliced by what you are looking for, not by who published it. Open tenders, Planned and Panels each hold every jurisdiction in one list, and a row of chips above the list narrows it to one — Commonwealth is one chip, each state another, and a chip outside your plan shows how many records are there and links to the plan that includes them. Every card still says what it is and where it was published: "Approach to market · AusTender" beside "Tender notice · Tenders WA", "Standing offer" beside "State scheme".

Opportunities holds the forward view. Approaches to market are open AusTender tenders, expressions of interest and requests for information, refreshed daily, each with its ATM number, buying entity, UNSPSC category and closing date — and, once enrichment is running, a plain-language summary, an ICT flag, a likely incumbent and a value band written at ingest. Planned procurement sits earlier still: Commonwealth entities publish an annual procurement plan of what they expect to go to market for, which is where incumbency is usually decided.

The other subsections cover the ways work reaches the market without a conventional tender. Planned holds Commonwealth plan lines and the state forward plans together. Panels lists the Commonwealth's standing offers, one row per SON, beside the state standing schemes, because most Commonwealth ICT and services spend is bought through a standing offer and being off the panel means never seeing the work. Grants lists GrantConnect grant opportunities in three tabs — Open, Ongoing and Closed. An ongoing round takes applications continuously and publishes no closing date, so it reads Ongoing wherever a closing date would be and is never called closing soon; each round carries the total funding published for it and, once they are made, the grant awards given under it. State and territory records are included from Launch Plus up, and in the trial. The ACT also publishes the invoices it has paid, which are their own list under Awards — never counted with its tenders, plans or awards.

State tenders and forward plans

Open tenders holds every state that publishes its tenders — New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory — beside AusTender, one chip per jurisdiction. A state tender is one record whose status moves over its life: open, then closed, then awarded, not awarded, withdrawn or expired, as the publisher says. Open is a tender the publisher lists as open whose closing time is still ahead; Closed is every one that is not, whatever happened next, and its card says which. The New South Wales archive says only that a process is "complete" — not whether a contract followed — so we show it as closed and never as awarded.

Planned holds each state's forward plans the same way: New South Wales's procurement plan, Queensland's pipeline (below), and the advance tender notices Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory publish. Planned shows current entries. Those five publishers follow a notice to its end, so its record page says whether it went to market, was awarded, was withdrawn by the publisher, or lapsed without going to market.

Queensland's forward procurement pipeline

Queensland publishes a forward procurement pipeline as open data — the work its agencies intend to take to market, reissued about monthly — and it sits in Planned, under the QLD chip, beside the Commonwealth plan lines and the other states' forward plans. A forward plan is not a tender and not an opportunity you can respond to: nothing has been published, there is no closing date, and there is no document. It is the earliest published sign that work is coming, which is usually months before the tender and often before the requirement is fixed.

The timing and the spend are the agency's own words, and we leave them that way. A programme's expected approach reads Jul - Sep 26 on one row and July – Dec 27 on the next, and its spend reads Less than $1M, $10M - $50M or <$10m — around two dozen spellings each, typed into a spreadsheet by thirty-eight different agencies. We show them exactly as published and do not parse them into dates, sort them or add them up: a band is not a contract value, so a forward plan carries no estimated value at all, and a tidy-looking number here would be our arithmetic rather than the agency's intention. The procurement method is the same, and on some rows it reads TBC.

Withdrawn means it left the file, and nothing more. Each monthly release is the whole pipeline as it stands, so an entry that is no longer in the newest file is marked withdrawn. The publisher does not say whether the work went to market, was cancelled or was merged into something else — so neither do we. Planned shows current entries; a withdrawn one is still on its record page.

Queensland also flags the programmes related to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and those carry a Brisbane 2032 label on the card and a badge on the record page. Queensland's open tenders come from QTenders and are under Open tenders with every other state's. Its awarded contracts are open data and are loaded — the agencies' own contract disclosure reports, from A$10,000 up — and they live under Awards, where the limits of that count are set out.

What the nightly enrichment adds

Every approach to market published today is read overnight, and four things are written against it for the morning. They are on the record page, and the ICT flag is on the cards too.

• A plain-language summary — the same two-to-four sentences you would get by opening the record, written before you open it.
• An ICT flag, with a reason. Yes or no, and one sentence saying why, so a flag you disagree with is an argument rather than a mystery. It is a label, not a filter: you cannot yet search on it, and it can be wrong — a notice published under an odd category, or one that buys a building and mentions its cabling.
• A likely incumbent. The contracts the same agency has already awarded whose titles look like this approach's, started in the last four years, best match first — each with the supplier, what the contract was worth, when it ends, and a link to the contract itself. This is title similarity against the contract record, not a prediction: a strong match usually is the incumbent, a possible one is worth opening, and no match at all means nothing at that agency looked similar enough to show you.
• A value band. What comparable contracts have been worth — the middle half of them, from the similar contracts above, or from this agency's contracts in the same category, or from every agency's, whichever has enough to say something. The page prints the basis and how many contracts are in it. It is not an estimate of this approach's value: AusTender publishes no estimate on an approach to market, and we do not invent one.

All four are written the night after a notice is published, so an approach that appeared this morning shows the summary and says the rest is coming. Nothing here is written while you read the page.

What you can do

• Filter open tenders by agency, and Commonwealth ones by UNSPSC category from a card's Category facet; sort them by closing date. There is no value-band or closing-window filter yet.
• See planned activity months before an ATM exists.
• Find the standing offers you could join, and when the window closes.
• Turn any of it into a pursuit, or keep it as a saved search.
• Export a filtered list as CSV, within the row limit and daily export count on your plan.