How do I search in a bid match profile?

If your center participates in the Bid Match program, then some or all of your clients have a search profile in their client record (and on our system) that gets processed, on a daily basis, against all new bid opportunities released that day. The words, phrases, and codes in this search profile can be used to locate client records.

For example, perhaps you're creating a profile for a new client who does remediation, and you want to take a look at some of your other clients who already have a search profile in place for this type of work as reference. Or perhaps you were recently working with a client, but can't remember their company name, only that they make uniforms. Or maybe you want to team up one client who does aqueduct repairs with another client who does bridge repairs.

Any of these scenarios may cause you to want to search for data that is contained in your clients' search profiles. So, how do you search within a profile?

It’s easy in WebCATS—simply create a client subset! Follow these steps:

Select View|Clients/Pre-clients and from the client record summary screen, click the Client Subset button.
In the subset criteria screen, select the Search Profiles Criteria field (found towards the bottom of the screen, under the "Criteria" heading).

Depending on your search goals, you may also want to consider selecting the Client/Pre-Client Type field to eliminate inactive client records from your subset results. And, of course, you can select any other criterion you wish to isolate the exact grouping of records you are looking for. (For example, selecting the Company Veteran Status field to search for veteran-owned business who perform aqueduct repairs.)

After selecting all desirable subset criteria, click the Specify Criteria button.
If you’d like to search client records for centers other than, or in addition to, the current active center, expand the Center(s) selection field and select/deselect the centers you would like included in the subset.
In the Search Profile Criteria field, enter the keyword you would like to search for. Be sure to surround your keyword with asterisks, which serve as wildcards. Since search profiles contain multiple lines of text and keywords, it is very important to wildcard your searches, as shown in the next graphic.

Note: Another important consideration is how will the words be listed in the search profile. For example, the word engineering will seldom appear as such in a search profile. Instead, the keyword in the search profile is probably abbreviated to engineer* so as to match on engineer, engineers, and engineering. You must search on the simple version of the word (e.g. engineer) in order to make a match, rather than the fully spelled out word.

If you have multiple keywords that you would like to search for, each should be surrounded by asterisks and separated by commas, as shown in the next graphic.

If you’d like to save this subset, select the Save Subset for future use? option and enter a descriptive name for it in the adjacent Name field. For more information on managing saved subsets, view the FAQ titled Can I save my subset for future use or to share it with other WebCATS users?.
Click the Finish button to generate a list of all client records (for the centers selected in step 4) with search profiles containing the keyword(s) you specified.

The capabilities of subsets are endless and are available for most record types. For more information on subsets, view our other popular resources on this topic:

Want more? Browse our extensive list of WebCATS FAQs.