The ARDF Supplier Portal, explained

How ARDF buys, what the portal does at each stage, and exactly what you do on every screen — from registering to being paid.

Every purchase African Relief and Development Foundation makes runs through this portal. There is no parallel paper process and no side channel: a quotation emailed to a staff member does not reach the evaluation, and an invoice handed over at reception does not reach the payment queue. Everything below takes ten minutes to read once and will save you a great deal of chasing.

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1How ARDF buys

Knowing the shape of the process tells you what to expect next and when silence is normal. A purchase moves through these stages, and you see your own part of it in the portal at each one.

• A department raises a requisition. Somebody in a programme or office asks to buy something, against a budget line. You see nothing yet.
• Procurement builds a shortlist. The supplier register is filtered on industry, service category and specialization — and only validated suppliers are offered. This is where an empty profile costs you work.
• An RFQ is issued, or a tender is published. Small and routine purchases go out as a Request for Quotation to a shortlist. Larger ones are published as an open tender that any validated supplier can bid for.
• Quotations are compared. Procurement builds a comparative bid analysis: price, delivery time, and whether you meet the specification. The award is not automatically the lowest price.
• A Purchase Order is issued to the winner — and, for larger or longer engagements, a contract.
• You deliver. ARDF records a Goods Received Note (GRN) confirming what actually arrived, in what condition.
• You invoice against that GRN, and finance raises the payment request from it.

2Getting into the portal

The portal lives at https://www.ardf-ss.org/supplier/login. You sign in with the email address your business registered with, and the password you chose. If your business is not registered yet, use Register — once, and once only.

Registration asks for your company details, your bank details and your documents. Your account is then reviewed and approved, which means we know who you are. Approval is not the same as validation — see section 5.

3The Dashboard

The first screen after signing in is a summary of everything that concerns you, so you do not have to hunt through the menu to find out whether anything has changed.

4Your Profile

Profile is the last item in the menu, and it is the most important screen in the portal. It has four parts, and each part saves separately — you can complete one today and the rest when the paperwork is to hand.

Contact details and bank details

Your bank details are what a payment is issued against, so they must match your bank confirmation letter exactly — name, number, branch. A mismatch between the two is the single most common reason a payment is held.

Industry, specializations and key services

This is the section that puts you in front of a buyer, and it is the one almost every registered supplier has left blank. When a requisition is raised, procurement filters the register on exactly these fields. Tick what you really do rather than everything on the list — a supplier that claims all of it tells a buyer nothing, and the specialization you genuinely hold is what gets you shortlisted. Describe your key services in your own words: what you supply, at what scale, and where you can deliver.

Documents

Where a document expires, enter the expiry date beside it. An expired document is treated as missing rather than as evidence, and the portal will tell you so. A clear phone photograph is accepted; a PDF or scan is better. Each file may be up to 20 MB. Anything already uploaded is listed above the boxes with a Replace button on each row.

5Validation — the gate

Two different things are recorded about your business, and confusing them is why suppliers wait for invitations that never come.

A missing item is not an automatic refusal — a reviewer may still validate a small local trader with no formal company profile document, and may decline a supplier whose paperwork is perfect. What the system insists on is that a person makes the decision, that it is recorded, and that a refusal carries a reason. That reason is shown to you on this same panel, so you are never left guessing.

6RFQs — quoting for work

A Request for Quotation is an invitation addressed to you. When one is issued you get an email and a notification, and it appears under RFQs and on your dashboard.

Open one and you see what is being bought, in what quantity, to what specification, by when, and on what payment terms — plus any documents issued with the RFQ, which you can download.

Submitting your quotation

1. Price each line. Enter a unit price and a delivery time for every requested item. The system multiplies the unit price by the quantity — you do not enter the total.
2. Attach your quotation. Your own quotation on your letterhead, up to 20 MB. This is the document the evaluators read, so make it complete: validity period, what is included, what is not.
3. Add notes if you need to. Anything the price alone does not say — a substitution you are offering, a lead time that depends on shipping.
4. Press Submit Quotation. You get a confirmation immediately. You can re-submit before the deadline; the new file replaces the old one.

If you do not want the work, please use Decline this RFQ with a short reason rather than staying silent. It costs you nothing, and it tells procurement to stop waiting on you — which makes you more likely to be invited next time, not less.

7Tenders — bidding for larger work

Tenders are published rather than addressed to you: any validated supplier may bid, and open ones are listed under Tenders and on your dashboard. A tender submission has more to it than a quotation:

• A technical proposal — how you will do the work, your capacity, your team, your timeline. Required.
• A financial proposal — your pricing, as a separate document. Required, and kept separate on purpose so the technical evaluation is not swayed by the price.
• Supporting files — references, certificates, samples of past work. Optional, as many as you need.
• Notes — anything the documents do not cover.

You may have one active submission per tender. Everything you have sent is listed under My Submissions, where you can download your own files again. Each file may be up to 20 MB. If your business has not been validated, the portal will tell you so at this point rather than accepting a bid that cannot be considered.

8Purchase Orders

Win the work and a Purchase Order is issued. It appears under Purchase Orders once it has been approved internally — a PO still going through ARDF's own approvals is not yet an instruction to you, so you will not see it.

On the PO screen you can:

• Download the PO as a PDF — the formal document, with the items, quantities, prices, delivery point and terms.
• Acknowledge receipt and acceptance — one button. This records that you have received the order and accept it, with the date and who clicked it.

Please acknowledge promptly. Until you do, nobody at ARDF knows whether the order reached you, and delivery expectations are being set against a document you may never have opened. If you cannot fulfil an order, say so by email straight away rather than acknowledging it.

9Contracts

Larger or longer engagements are governed by a contract as well as a PO. Contracts appear under Contracts once they have been published to you. Read it, download the PDF, and then sign it in one of two ways:

• Accept digitally — tick the acceptance box and confirm. The system records the date, and which portal account did it, and that is treated as your signature.
• Upload a signed copy — print it, sign and stamp it, scan it, and upload. Up to 20 MB. Uploading a new copy replaces the previous one.

Either is sufficient; you do not need to do both. Your signed copy stays available for you to download again from the same screen.

10GRNs — proof of delivery

When you deliver, ARDF records a Goods Received Note: what actually arrived, how much of it, in what condition, on what date, received by whom. It appears under GRNs with any attachments — delivery notes, inspection photographs — which you can download.

Where GRN acknowledgement is enabled you can confirm the GRN from the portal, the same way you acknowledge a PO. Check the GRN carefully. It is the record of what was received, and your invoice is checked against it: if it says nine units and you delivered ten, raise it before you invoice, not after.

11Invoices and getting paid

Invoices go through Invoices in the portal. An invoice is always raised against a GRN — that is what ties your claim to a delivery that ARDF has confirmed receiving. A GRN that already has a payment request against it will not be offered again, which is what stops the same delivery being invoiced twice.

You enter:

It is then Submitted, moves to Under Review while procurement checks it against the PO and the GRN, and becomes Payment Request Created when finance has raised the payment. If something is wrong it is Rejected with a reason, and you correct and re-submit. The status is on your dashboard and on the invoice itself, so you can see where your money is without telephoning.

12Rules that trip people up

• 20 MB per file, everywhere. If a file is refused it is too large — photograph the pages separately or scan at a lower resolution.
• Deadlines are real. A quotation after the deadline is marked Late and the evaluators see it.
• One active bid per tender. Withdraw before you replace.
• Invoice numbers must be unique while an invoice is open under that number.
• Never register twice. A duplicate record cannot be invited to quote.
• An expired document counts as missing. Put real expiry dates in, and replace documents before they lapse.
• Keep your contact email current. Every invitation goes to it; a dead address means silence you will read as “no work”.
• Nothing arrives by any route but the portal and its emails. If someone contacts you about an ARDF tender outside these, treat it with suspicion and check with us.

13What each status means

Your quotation on an RFQ

Your tender submission

Your invoice

14Security and getting help

• ARDF will never ask you for a payment, a fee or a deposit in order to be registered, validated, shortlisted or awarded work. Anyone who does is not acting for us — report it to the address below.
• We will never ask you for your portal password. Staff cannot see it and do not need it.
• Every genuine message from this system names the department that sent it and carries that department's contact details. A bare link with no sender is not from us.
• Change your bank details on the portal yourself. We will not change them on the strength of an email.
• If your contact person leaves, sign in and change the email on your profile the same week.

Sign in to the portal

A shorter version covering just the profile and documents is at https://www.ardf-ss.org/supplier/guide.