Supplier registration

Supplier registration is the act of enrolling in a supplier system: creating the account, classifying the firm under commodity codes, and filing the standard documents — business registration, tax numbers, banking, insurance, certifications. It is what makes a firm eligible to bid, visible in searches, and payable; it wins nothing by itself.

Registration in Canada is per level of government: the federal systems, each province's, and many municipalities are separate, each with its own account. All are free. The failure modes are all quiet: registering under a single code when the work straddles two, letting insurance lapse so the account suspends, updating nothing after a name or banking change so payments and notices misroute. The scale is worth appreciating — 183,024 distinct vendors appear in the compiled federal award record (2004–2026), every one of them registered first. Tools like pubsec.pro then make the registered feeds useful, collapsing federal and provincial notices into a single stream once the accounts exist.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-supplier-registration,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {Supplier registration — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/supplier-registration},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}