Submitting bids on GPG TendaSwift
Gauteng Provincial Treasury's e-submission portal in plain words: the four tender views, where the documents download from, the sign-in you do yourself, SAST closing times, and the four upload sections.
What TendaSwift is
TendaSwift is the Gauteng Provincial Government's portal for advertising bids and taking them in electronically. It runs at etenders.gauteng.gov.za and belongs to Gauteng Provincial Treasury. Instead of dropping a sealed envelope in a bid box, you read the advert on the portal, download the bid document from it, and upload your completed bid back into it.
Not every Gauteng buyer uses it, and the set of departments and entities that do has grown over time. Many Gauteng bids are also advertised on the national eTenders portal. Whatever you find and wherever you find it, the bid document itself says where and how to submit. Follow the document, not a habit.
Two addresses that look alike. etenders.gauteng.gov.za (no hyphen) is TendaSwift, where you read the advert and submit. e-tenders.gauteng.gov.za (with a hyphen) is the older provincial site. They are different systems with almost the same name, so check the address bar before you type anything into a form.
Browsing is anonymous. Applying is not.
This is the single most useful thing to know about the portal, and it decides how you plan your week.
- Anyone can browse without an account. You can open the portal, page through the advertised bids, open a tender and download its documents with no sign-in at all. Nothing identifies you and nothing is reserved for you.
- Applying requires a sign-in. Submitting a bid goes through a Microsoft Entra External ID account — an email address you verify, with a code sent to that mailbox at each sign-in. That account is created and used by the bidder, on the bidder's own device.
So you can do all of the reading, the pricing and the paperwork before anyone signs in to anything. Only the last step needs the account — and it needs it on the day, with the mailbox open.
We never sign in and we never submit. Nobody needs your TendaSwift password, your verification code or your session to help you prepare a bid. Not a consultant, and not us. We prepare what you type and upload; you press every button on the portal yourself. If anyone asks you for that code, that is the end of the conversation.
The four views, and what each one is for
The portal splits tenders into four lists. Bidders use the first; the other three are the free market research almost nobody reads.
| View | Path | What it is worth to you |
|---|---|---|
| Advertised | /View-Advertised | Open bids you can still answer. This is the list to check on a schedule. |
| Closed | /View-Closed | Bids past their closing time, awaiting evaluation. Useful for seeing what a department buys and how often. |
| Awarded | /View-Awarded | Who won, and usually at what value. The cheapest competitor research in South African procurement. |
| Cancelled | /View-Cancelled | Bids withdrawn or cancelled. Worth a glance before you spend a week on a re-advertised specification. |
Opening a tender from any of those lists takes you to its detail page, at a path of the form
/Tenders-Open/?id=… with the tender's own identifier at the end. That page carries the description, the
closing date and time, the contact details, and the tender's document sub-grid — the small table of attached
files. The bid document downloads from that sub-grid, one file at a time. Take every file in it, including the
ones that look like duplicates; departments often attach the pricing schedule or a returnables annexure separately.
Closing times are SAST, and they are literal
Every closing date and time the portal shows is South African Standard Time (UTC+2, no daylight saving). A bid that lands after the closing time is a late bid, and a late bid is not evaluated. The portal does not care why the upload was slow.
Plan to submit a working day early. Uploads over a household connection take longer than you think, four upload steps take longer than one, and the email code that lets you sign in arrives when it arrives.
Before you start: have these in front of you
Supplier registration asks for your company's details across several screens. Gather them first, from your own documents, so every answer matches what the buyer will check against CSD.
- Your CSD supplier number and a recent CSD registration report from secure.csd.gov.za.
- Company registration number, legal name and trading name, exactly as on your CIPC documents.
- Income tax number, your tax compliance status PIN and the date it expires.
- VAT number, if you are registered for VAT.
- B-BBEE affidavit or certificate: your level, and the percentage of black ownership held by women, youth, people with disabilities, people in rural areas, military veterans and cooperatives.
- Physical and postal addresses, split into lines, with the suburb, city, municipality, province and postal code.
- A contact person with a phone number, a cell number and an email address that someone reads every day.
Step 1: the administrator account
The portal works through one person, the administrator, who registers the business and submits on its behalf. Usually that is the owner or whoever manages tenders.
- Choose Sign in and the Microsoft Entra External ID option, then choose to create an account.
- Enter your email address. A verification code arrives in that mailbox; type it in.
- Give a display name, first name and surname, and confirm the email address.
- Complete the profile: name, business phone, organisation name, your position, organisation size and website.
Each later sign-in sends a fresh code to the same mailbox. Use one you can open on your phone on the day a bid closes, and one that does not belong to a staff member who might leave.
Step 2: register the business as a supplier
Signed in as administrator, open Supplier Details and register. The form runs over four screens, each ending with Next, and the last with Submit.
| Screen | What it asks | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier details | Legal and trade name, registration number, supplier type and sub-type, industry classification, website, tax registration and tax compliance status, income tax number, tax country, VAT registration and VAT number. | CIPC documents, your CSD report, SARS eFiling. |
| B-BBEE ownership | Percentage of black ownership in six groups: women, cooperatives, military veterans, people living with disabilities, youth, and people living in rural areas. | Your B-BBEE affidavit or certificate, and your CSD record. |
| Contact details | Contact type, name, telephone, cell, email, and how you prefer to hear about procurement changes. | The person who will actually answer the buyer. |
| Addresses | A physical and a postal address, line by line, and which one is preferred. | Your municipal account, lease or CSD record. |
- Use the same facts everywhere. A trading name or an ownership percentage that differs from your CSD record or your affidavit invites a question you do not want at evaluation.
- Type 0 where a group does not apply. Do not guess a percentage. It is a declaration.
- Keep it current. Supplier Details has an Edit button that walks the same four screens. Use it whenever your B-BBEE level, tax status or contact person changes; viewing the record changes nothing.
Step 3: read the tender before you touch the application
Open the tender from /View-Advertised, download every file in the document sub-grid, and read the bid
document. Find three things first: the returnables list, the pricing schedule, and the closing date and
time. Everything else follows from those.
Asking a question: everyone will read it
A tender's detail page lets you put a question to the department, and questions asked that way are published for all bidders. Write neutrally. "Section 4 asks for three references. May a bidder use private-sector clients?" is a good question. "We are ABC Plumbing and we want to know…" tells your competitors who is bidding and what you are unsure about.
Step 4: apply for the tender
On the tender's detail page, choose to apply. The application saves step by step:
- Your supplier details for this bid: CSD supplier number, trading name, B-BBEE level, tax compliance PIN and the PIN's expiry date.
- Bid price: the total amount of your bid.
- B-BBEE level check: the level carries across from Supplier Details and cannot be changed here. If it is wrong, fix Supplier Details first, then come back.
- Four uploads: Section A, Section B, Section C and Section D.
- Finish: choose whether you want a confirmation email, then submit.
The bid price you type must equal your pricing document. A different figure puts two prices in one bid, and the evaluator has to decide which one you meant. Copy the total to the cent from the final version of your pricing schedule, and make SBD 1 agree with both.
If the bid document does not say whether that figure includes VAT, ask the question early. If you are not registered for VAT, do not add VAT.
What goes in Sections A, B, C and D
The portal gives you four upload slots. It does not tell you what belongs in each — the bid document does.
- Follow the section headings or the returnables list in the bid document, and put each document where it is named.
- Put the pricing document where the bid document tells you to, usually with the technical proposal.
- If the split is genuinely unclear, ask a neutral question well before closing.
- Upload complete, legible PDFs with plain file names, such as SBD4_Bidders_Disclosure_signed.pdf. An evaluator who cannot find a document has not received it.
Step 5: after you submit
The bid appears in your list of submitted bids with its status. You can open it to see what you sent, and you can amend it — but only while the tender is still open. After the closing time, what is on the portal is what gets evaluated.
- Keep your own copy of every uploaded file, the bid price you typed and the confirmation email, in one folder for that tender.
- If a document changes after you submit — a corrected pricing schedule, a renewed affidavit — go back and amend the bid before closing. A newer file on your laptop does not update the portal.
Where first-time bidders slip
- A stale B-BBEE level. The affidavit was renewed but Supplier Details never was, so the old level carries into the application and into the preference points.
- A tax PIN that lapses. Check the expiry date falls after the closing date, not after today.
- Two different prices. The portal figure, the pricing schedule and SBD 1 must agree exactly.
- A question that names you. It is published. Strip out anything that identifies the business.
- A missing file from the sub-grid. Downloading only the main document and missing the annexure next to it is a returnable you will never know you left out.
- Leaving it for closing day. Account creation, an emailed code and four uploads all take time, and SAST closing times do not stretch.
Disclaimer. This is general information in our own words, not legal advice, and not a substitute for the portal's own supplier manual. Tender Proof Engine is independent and is not affiliated with Gauteng Provincial Treasury. Portal screens change. The bid document you are answering always takes precedence.
Get your TendaSwift details ready
A straight answer first. We cannot get you a tender, and nobody can. Awards are made by a bid adjudication committee against price, preference points and functionality. What we do is make sure the envelope you hand in survives the paperwork check that eliminates most small businesses before anyone reads their price.