Concepts and glossary
Notices, stages, lots, organizations, sources, CPV and NUTS explained in plain language.
Procurement has its own vocabulary, and every portal uses it slightly differently. These are the words that appear in Polytender.
The core distinction: procurement vs. notice
A procurement is the thing a public buyer wants to buy. A notice is one published document about it. One procurement usually produces several notices over time: a prior information notice, the actual call for competition, maybe a correction, and finally the award.
Polytender stores notices and links the ones that belong together. That is why a tender can show a timeline of related notices, see One procurement, several notices.
Stage
Every notice carries a stage, normalised across all portals:
| Stage | What it means |
|---|---|
| Tender | An active call for competition. This is what you can bid on. |
| Award | The result: who won, at what value. |
| Planning | Prior information, market consultation, sources sought. An early signal, not yet biddable. |
| Amendment | A correction or change to an existing notice. |
| Cancellation | The procedure was cancelled. |
| Other | Anything that fits none of the above. |
Status is a second, independent axis and only applies to tender-stage notices, because only they have a submission deadline:
- Open: the deadline is still in the future.
- Closing soon: the deadline is within the next 14 days.
- Closed: the deadline has passed.
- Unknown: no deadline was published. Still a real tender.
Lot
A lot is a separately biddable slice of one procurement, for example "Lot 1 shell construction" and "Lot 2 electrical". Lots are never merged: each is bid for on its own. Polytender shows them as one labelled series so a framework split into twelve lots does not look like twelve unrelated tenders.
Search profile
A saved, re-runnable description of what your company does (summary, sector, keywords, CPV codes, negative keywords, countries and regions). New tenders are matched and ranked against it. Search profiles belong to the organization, so everyone in it sees the same lists.
Organization
The shared unit of work: it owns the search profiles, holds the members and carries the plan. It has exactly one owner, plus admins and members. Favorites, private notes and email alert subscriptions are personal and stay yours even inside a shared organization. You can belong to several organizations and switch between them. See What is an organization.
Source
One portal we aggregate, for example TED EU, the German Bekanntmachungsservice, Austria's Kerndaten or SAM.gov. Every notice keeps a link back to its original source. See Coverage and freshness.
CPV
The Common Procurement Vocabulary: the EU's classification for what is being
bought, an eight-digit code with a label. 72000000 is IT services,
45000000 construction. Buyers pick the codes, so they are useful but not
always precise; we therefore match keywords and meaning as well.
Codes are hierarchical. The first two digits are the division (for example
45 construction), and filtering on a division is usually more productive than
on an exact code.
Ukraine uses DK 021:2015, which is the Ukrainian adoption of CPV, so the same codes and filters work for Ukrainian tenders without any change.
NUTS and regions
NUTS is the EU's geographic coding system, from country down to district.
DE21 is Upper Bavaria, AT13 is Vienna. Polytender's region filter uses NUTS
prefixes, plus state codes for the US. See
Regions and the map filter.
Buyer
The public body publishing the notice: a city, a ministry, a utility, a hospital. On the detail page you see its name and, when published, its address, email and phone.