How to become a vendor for the City of Fort Worth: registration, certification, and bids

Fort Worth buys everything from traffic signal poles to professional services, and the process to sell to the city is more procedural than mysterious. The trip-up for most owners is that there are two systems, not one, and they do different jobs. Get registered in the right places, decide whether certification is worth your time, and learn where bids are posted. That is the whole game.

This guide walks through each step the way the city actually runs it, with the names and rules you will hit along the way.

Step 1: Register on the PeopleSoft Supplier Portal

Every company that wants to do business with Fort Worth starts by registering as a Bidder on the city's PeopleSoft Supplier Portal. Registration is free and takes a few minutes. You create a supplier record, list your commodity and service categories, and capture contact and tax details. This record is what the city pays against once you win work, so accuracy here matters later.

The portal lives under the city's Finance/Purchasing pages at fortworthtexas.gov. Treat the PeopleSoft registration as your foundational identity with the city. It is the supplier file; it is not where you will browse or respond to most bids.

Step 2: Set up your Bonfire account for solicitations

Here is the part that catches people. The City of Fort Worth moved its solicitation process to Bonfire, the e-procurement platform from Bonfire Interactive. Every solicitation posted on or after January 1, 2024 is advertised, collected, and awarded through Bonfire, not through the old process.

That means you need a Bonfire account in addition to your PeopleSoft record. Bonfire is where you will see open invitations to bid (ITBs), requests for proposals (RFPs), and requests for qualifications (RFQs); download bid documents; and submit your response electronically before the deadline. Registration on the city's Bonfire portal is free and quick.

Practical takeaway: PeopleSoft makes you a known supplier and gets you paid. Bonfire is where you find and win the work. Set up both before you start chasing a specific opportunity, because you do not want to be creating accounts the night a response is due.

Step 3: Decide whether to certify with the Office of Business Diversity

Fort Worth's diverse-business policy runs through the Office of Business Diversity, which sits in the city's diversity and inclusion structure. The governing rule has been the Business Diversity Enterprise (BDE) Ordinance, the successor framework to the city's older M/WBE program. The office sets project-specific subcontracting goals and helps minority- and women-owned firms reach both prime and subcontract opportunities.

Certification can change the math on a bid. Under the city's incentive structure, projects flagged as "Joint Venture Preferred" have awarded an additional 20 evaluation points to bids that include at least one M/WBE joint-venture partner. On construction contracts up to $100,000 and on professional services and architecture/engineering contracts up to $150,000, certified M/WBE proposers have received additional evaluation points (with a cap on how much can be subcontracted to non-M/WBE firms). Points like these decide close contracts.

One moving piece to check before you rely on it: Fort Worth has been shifting toward a Best Value approach with a 5% Small Business Preference on contracts up to $100,000, and it suspended parts of the Business Equity Ordinance to stay compliant with federal grant requirements while standing up a new Small Business Development Program. So the exact preference that applies to your bid depends on the contract type, dollar value, and funding source. Read each solicitation's evaluation criteria rather than assuming the same rule applies everywhere.

If you want help understanding which certifications you can stack at the federal, state, and local level, our certification guides break the requirements down by program, and CertifyAll can handle the applications for you across multiple agencies at once.

Step 4: Watch the right bid channels

Open and awarded solicitations are visible to the public. Current and past bids are listed through the city's Purchasing pages, and the live response process runs through the Bonfire portal for anything posted in 2024 or later. A few habits that pay off:

• Check the current-bids listing on a set schedule. City buyers post on their own timelines, and response windows are often short.
• Read the full solicitation document, not just the title. The scope, the insurance and bonding requirements, the local or small-business preference, and any subcontracting goal are all spelled out there.
• Note the pre-bid or pre-proposal meeting. For larger construction and services work, these are often where the real requirements and the incumbent dynamics become clear.

Local chambers are also useful intelligence. The Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber and the Fort Worth Metropolitan Black Chamber both run certification, matchmaking, and solicitation workshops with the Office of Business Diversity, and those sessions are where you meet the buyers and prime contractors face to face.

Step 5: Build the documents you will reuse

Whatever the contract, you will be asked for a recurring set of materials: your W-9, proof of insurance, any required bonding, references, and on diverse-business bids the city's Business Equity Utilization Form documenting your subcontracting plan. Assemble these once and keep them current. A capability statement that states your NAICS codes, past performance, and certifications shortens every future response.

If you are also pursuing state-level work, Texas runs its own HUB (Historically Underutilized Business) certification, and that opens doors beyond the city. Our state-by-state guide shows how Texas programs line up, and the corporate and agency directory maps which buyers recognize which certifications.

Where this leaves you

Becoming a Fort Worth vendor is a sequence, not a single application: register in PeopleSoft, set up Bonfire, weigh certification against the contracts you actually bid, and then watch the right channels. None of it costs money to start. What it costs is attention to the details inside each solicitation, because that is where the preferences and goals that win contracts are defined.

If you would rather not navigate the local, state, and federal certification paperwork one form at a time, see how CertifyAll captures your business information once and prepares the applications you qualify for. It is a faster way to get certification-ready before your next Fort Worth bid.