How sussit works
An honest explanation of what happens when you search, what we can currently confirm, and what we can't yet.
1. Tenders — connected and live
Tender data currently comes from two official, free, public sources:
- National Treasury eTenders — the Open Contracting Data Standard API National Treasury publishes for the central eTenders portal. Covers tenders from government departments and entities that publish through eTenders.
- City of Cape Town's open data portal — a public, no-login feed of City of Cape Town supply chain tender award decisions. This covers award decisions specifically (who won, and the outcome), not tenders currently open for bidding, so a match here confirms the reference number is real, not that it's still open.
Every day, sussit automatically pulls the latest data from both feeds. When you search a tender reference number, company, or department name, we check it against everything pulled from these sources. If it matches, we tell you which source confirmed it and link back to the original record where possible.
2. Jobs — not connected yet
Job vacancy checking, including DPSA (Department of Public Service and Administration) public service posts, is not connected yet. If you search a job reference number today, sussit will honestly tell you it couldn't find it — it will never invent or guess a result just to give you an answer.
3. What “not found” actually means
If sussit can't find your reference number, that does not mean it's a scam. It most often means one of these:
- The source that would confirm it isn't connected to sussit yet (like jobs, right now).
- The tender or job is real but hasn't made it into that day's data pull.
- The reference number was typed slightly differently than how it's listed officially.
When we can't find something, always verify directly with the issuing organisation using contact details from their own official website — never from the listing or message you're trying to verify.
4. Scam reports
Separately from official sources, sussit also checks your search against a database of scams reported by other users. Every report is reviewed by a moderator before it's marked as confirmed — nothing submitted through the report a scam form goes live automatically.
5. Sources we plan to add
DPSA job vacancies, other provincial and municipal tender portals, and state-owned enterprise procurement listings (Eskom, Transnet, SANRAL, and others) are on the roadmap. Most of these don't offer a public data feed the way eTenders and Cape Town do, so adding them takes more work — this page will be updated honestly as each one actually goes live, not before.