New field added to AusTender data
The Department of Finance is making a range of improvements to AusTender reporting in the coming months and today we’ve seen the first of those start to trickle through into the data provided by the Government.
Contract execution date
This new field provides the execution date as outlined in the contract and is required to be reported by agencies.
Today’s update (AwardedTenders data is updated weekly on Sunday) saw 5 Contract Notices with this new field included (out of almost 3,000 contract notices in the past week).
We’ve already added this field to our AwardedTenders platform, so as more notices are populated with this field it will be immediately accessible on our platform (just make sure to toggle the column to visible).
New exemption threshold of $500,000 for procurements from a SME
The Government recently announced changes to the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, including raising the exemption threshold for direct engagement of small and medium enterprise from $200k to $500k. Previously, in the data supplied by AusTender, contracts awarded with this exemption reason were presented as "APP A: 17. SME Procurements up to $200,000 or $500,000 for Defence."
Today’s update saw this updated to just “APP A: 17. SME Procurements up to $500,000”
While the recent changes to the CPR were broadly welcomed by SME groups, our analysis of the actual usage of this exemption in particular to-date shows it’s exceedingly rare: around one tenth of a percent of all procurements (in the past 10 years).
That could be because there hasn’t been a market for SMEs offering goods / services to Government under the $200k threshold (or $500k for Defence), or perhaps because Government procurement teams are not able or incentivised to engage SMEs for small procurements; time will tell as to whether this exemption actually gets more use now the threshold has been raised.