Every requirement, from the solicitation to the page that answers it
A compliance matrix is the solicitation turned into a list of everything it obliges you to do, in its own words, with the paragraph each came from. Here it is built on any notice when you shred it, and on every proposal from the solicitation and each amendment, with an owner, a status, a volume, evidence and a due date on every requirement.
a missing requirement costs the bid; an awkward one costs nothing
It reads the attachments, which is where the requirements actually are
On a real request for proposal the notice body is two paragraphs of synopsis. Sections L and M, the statement of work, the page limit and the address to send it to are in the attached files, and a tool that reads only the notice text produces a few rows where there should be dozens.
That is the worst thing a compliance tool can do, because a short answer looks exactly as finished as a complete one. So the attachments are opened and read: PDF, Word, rich text and plain text, with each document introduced by its own name so any row can be traced back to the file it came from.
And the screen says so. At the top of every matrix is one line naming how many of the solicitation's documents it was built from, and a package with anything still unopened says that in the warning colour, above the rows, rather than under them.
- A scan is reported as a scan, with the reason, never as a document that happened to contain nothing
- A document too large to read here says so rather than being silently truncated
- An amendment throws away everything read off the superseded package, because a matrix built from the old one is worse than none
- The readiness check and the clause list read the same package, which is where clause numbers have always lived
counted over all of it, not over a sample
The solicitation and each amendment, uploaded and read
Every proposal has a Compliance matrix tab. A proposal on a notice reads the notice's own documents, as the notice's matrix does. Any proposal also reads the files uploaded to it: the solicitation, its amendments numbered in the order they came, and its attachments. So a prime's request for proposal to a subcontractor, or a package from an agency portal, gets a matrix too.
Upload and read it keeps a file on the proposal and reads it into the matrix at once. An amendment either adds to the solicitation and is read beside the rest, or is the whole solicitation as amended and takes the place of the file it names, so a requirement it rewrote is read once, in its new words.
- PDF, Word, rich text, plain text and Markdown files, up to forty on one proposal
- A scan is a picture of text and has no words to read, and the tab says so
- Roughly three hundred pages are read in all, and a document cut short is named, because what is past the cut is not in the matrix
- Up to 8,000 requirements on one proposal
- Files uploaded here stay on the proposal: they are not listed in your library or matched as your own words
UEI, CAGE, then normalized name
The columns your team keeps on each requirement
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Owner | Somebody on the account. A requirement with nobody on it is counted as nobody yet. |
| Status | Not started, in progress, drafted, reviewed, final, or not applicable. The percent final leaves out the ones that do not apply. |
| Volume | The volume of the proposal that answers it. |
| Answered in | The section heading and the page of your proposal where it is answered. |
| Evidence | Documents and passages from your library, past performance records, and people on Key personnel, up to twenty of each. Find the passage in your library offers the passages that share the requirement's uncommon words. |
| Due | An internal due date. A requirement past its day that is not final or not applicable is overdue, and the due dates are on the calendar as Requirements due. |
| Note | Anything the team needs to say about it. |
Anybody on the proposal's team changes any column, and can change many requirements at once: an owner, a volume, a status or a due date for up to 5,000 in one change. Whoever owns a requirement changes its status, where it is answered, its evidence and its note. Each change is a line of the proposal's history.
What an amendment changed, requirement by requirement
Read the solicitation again after an amendment and the matrix is compared, not replaced. A requirement whose words changed keeps its owner, status and evidence on the closest new wording, and is marked as changed in that amendment, with the earlier wording kept beside it. One that appeared is marked new. One that went is marked removed and kept with its state. Nothing moves without a mark on it.
A line above the requirements says what the amendment did, in words: which amendment it was, how many requirements it changed, how many it added and how many it took away. Show the changes lists them. Each is marked checked once somebody has read it, one at a time or many together.
- The closest wording is the same paragraph and the most uncommon words in common
- When the documents change under a matrix already read, the tab says so above everything else
- On the first read of a proposal on a notice, the ticks, owners, answers and notes your team put on the notice's own matrix are brought across once, and the tab says how many
three per cent a year is 1.03 and then 1.0609, not 1.03 and then 1.06, and the government may exercise the last year at the number you wrote down four years earlier
The thing they will score you on and never asked you to send
A list of requirements is the start. What a capture manager is actually paid for is finding the defects in the solicitation before the deadline, and one of those is mechanical enough to do every time:
an evaluation factor in Section M with nothing in Section L behind it. The government has said it will score you on something it never instructed you to submit. A bidder who does not spot it hands in a proposal that cannot be scored on one of its factors.
That is a question to the contracting officer, the window for asking it closes days after release, and finding it is worth more than the rest of the table put together. The reverse comes out too: instructions nothing evaluates, which is where not to spend page count that is already too short.
On a proposal's Compliance matrix tab these come first, as Questions for the contracting officer, with the day questions close where the solicitation states it and how many days are left. The ones asked for and never scored are folded underneath. Each requirement carries its tag, Scored, never asked for, or Asked for, never scored, and the list across every proposal filters by either.
The matching is on the uncommon words two sentences share, and the words are printed on the page, so you can disagree with a match. A model asserting that two things are related without showing why would be a worse tool even when it agreed more often.
who already passes work down in your code from subaward reporting, filed by the prime
The rules that get a proposal returned unread
Page limits, font, margins, the due date with its timezone and the address it has to reach are pulled out and put at the top on their own.
They are not requirements to be answered, they are conditions for being read. A proposal two pages over the limit is not marked down, it is returned. A matrix that reports that as one row among hundreds has technically told you and practically hidden it.
- When questions close, and any site visit or conference
- The due date, with its time and the zone it names, because a bare "2:00" is not a deadline
- Page limits, with the number and the volume each is about
- Font and margin rules, which are compliance and not style
- Where it is sent, how it is sent, and the delivery address
- How long the offer is held firm
openness 61 of 99: a door exists here
Everything else the solicitation says
The same reading finds more than requirements, each with the document, section and paragraph where it is written. The key personnel positions it names, with the minimums stated for each. Every FAR and DFARS clause it cites, and whether the clause says to flow it down, where the clause library holds it. The deliverables and their dates, from Section F and the CDRL. How it is scored: the factors and subfactors as Section M names them, and Section M's own words on their order of importance and the basis for award. The representations and certifications Section K asks for. And the attachments Section J lists, each marked as in the package or not.
The scoring sheet of a colour-team review can take its factors from here, and a finding can name the requirement it is about.
Every requirement of every proposal being worked
Compliance matrix is a row of its own under Proposal in the menu. It lists every requirement of every proposal still being written or submitted and waiting, and opens on what needs a person: the requirements that are yours, the ones with nobody on them, the ones overdue, the ones changed by an amendment, and the questions for the contracting officer.
Beside the list are the requirements by proposal, with how far each is final, by status and by volume. Filter by any of them, by kind, by the crosswalk, or by words. The list downloads as an Excel workbook, and so does one proposal's matrix, with the constraints, the positions, the clauses, the deliverables, the evaluation factors, the representations, the attachments and the documents on tabs of their own.
- The register of proposals shows each one's matrix as a percent final, with what is overdue
- A proposal's Overview shows its matrix in figures
- Requirements due are on the calendar, a row for each proposal, day and owner
twenty-seven feeds from sixteen named systems, joined once so one question reaches all of them
No model wrote any row of it
A compliance matrix has exactly one job: be complete. A clumsily worded row costs nothing, because a human reads it and understands. A requirement that is MISSING costs the bid, because the proposal goes in non-responsive and quality elsewhere does not recover it. A language model asked to summarize a long solicitation will drop requirements, it will drop them silently, and the output looks exactly as confident as a complete one. So the extraction here is mechanical and the model is not in that path at all.
Every row is the document's own sentence, with the paragraph it came from
Sentences carrying an obligation are found by grammar, kept word for word, and stamped with the section, the paragraph number and the offset into the document. So a row does not read "limit the technical volume". It reads L.2.1, followed by the sentence the government actually wrote.
That is what makes the table usable by somebody who has to sign off on it: any row can be found in the PDF by its section and paragraph. A matrix whose rows cannot be traced has to be redone by hand before anybody will trust it, which is most of the work it was supposed to save.
It also means the matrix is the same whether or not AI is used. Where there is no section heading to go on, the kind of a requirement is read from its own words, by rule. On a notice's matrix, In plain words on one row asks for a short restatement of that one sentence, shown beside it and never in its place. Each press is one of your plan's AI readings for the month, unless it runs on the account's own AI key. Nothing on a proposal's Compliance matrix tab is written by a model.
- Sorted into what you must submit, what they will score, the work you are promising, deliverables, pricing and certifications
- A "shall not" is recorded as a prohibition, because it needs the opposite answer to a "shall"
- One requirement is one row, even when the solicitation repeats it
- Works on a commercial-item RFQ with no lettered sections
On a notice, every row can be ticked off, owned and answered
A compliance matrix that cannot leave the screen is a reading exercise. The reason anybody builds one is to hand a column of it to somebody else and to know, on the morning it is due, which rows are still open.
So each row of a notice's matrix carries three things that belong to your team rather than to the document: whether it is done, who owns it, and where it is answered. They are shared with everybody on your account, they survive a re-read after an amendment, and the whole matrix downloads as a spreadsheet, because a good many companies run their proposals out of one and always will.
- Ticks are keyed to the requirement's own words, so a re-read that reorders the list keeps them
- A requirement whose wording really changed correctly arrives unticked, which is the answer you want
- Only the field you touched is saved, so somebody ticking a box cannot wipe another's note
- One line at the top says how far through it the team is
the same joined record carries the search, the price and the invoice
A pointer, not a hint
"Your capability statement answers this" saves you nothing. You still have to open a long file and find the paragraph.
So every match says where: the heading it sits under, the paragraph number and how many there are, and the page, when the document printed a page number itself. Nothing is calculated from a character count, because a citation you open the file and cannot find costs more trust than it ever saved time.
- The section heading above the match, which is what you navigate by
- The paragraph number, which is always right and only ever coarse
- The page, only where the document states one
- And the words the match was made on, printed, so you can disagree
closer = ends sooner, bigger = larger last award
The named positions, and who on file answers each one
A solicitation that names key personnel is naming the thing that decides the bid. Section M scores the people, Section L asks for their resumes, and the minimums are stated in the document's own words: eight years, a bachelor's degree, an active Secret clearance, PMP.
Every named position is pulled out with the minimums stated in its own paragraph, never the ones stated next door, and every resume in your library is read against them. The count that matters is on top: how many of the named positions have a resume on file. A bid is lost by the one seat nobody can staff, not won by the ones that are easy.
Staff the positions makes each one a position on Key personnel, where every person on your bench is checked against its minimums.
- The positions the solicitation names, in its own words
- The minimums it states for each, quoted
- Which of your people states each minimum, and which they are silent on
- And the positions with nobody on file at all, first
printed on every notice, never searchable until now
What you already have, and what is being rewritten
A matrix is a list of work. Two things turn it into a decision.
The first is your library: every requirement shows which of your own documents answers it, where in that document, and the words the match was made on. The count on top is a bid/no-bid input, and you have it before the proposal is written.
The second is the rules. Where a requirement quotes a FAR or DFARS clause whose text is under revision, the row says so, names the rule, and gives you the comment deadline. That is a question for the contracting officer this week rather than a surprise at award, and it is there because the rules and the solicitations are read in the same place. See rules and funding.
every state the same size, so DC is readable
What it is not
It is not legal advice and it is not a substitute for reading the solicitation. It is the reading, done once, so that the argument on your bid or no-bid call is about the requirements rather than about whether anybody found them all.
It does not write your proposal. That needs your cost structure, your people and your past performance, and those are yours.
Then start the proposal
The matrix is the list of what to answer. Start the proposal, on the matrix of a notice whose solicitation has been read, lays the same requirements out as the parts of a proposal, with the passages of your own documents under each and a box for your text. Proposal drafts has a page of its own.
The proposal itself, with its volumes, team, schedule, reviews, approvals and submission, is a record of its own. Start a proposal on the notice, and its Compliance matrix tab reads the notice's documents and brings across what your team put on this matrix. Proposals has a page of its own too.
Where it stops
The compliance matrix comes with every paid plan, and a role can close it for a person. It reads the words of the documents it is given: a scan has none, a document past the length it reads is cut and named, and an amendment nobody uploaded is not in it. It is not legal advice and not a substitute for reading the solicitation. It does not write your proposal, and it sends nothing to the government.
Where it is in the app
Compliance matrix, under Proposal in the menu, and the Compliance matrix tab of each proposal. The matrix of one notice opens from the notice. Proposal is the part of LastAwarded that builds the response, one of the eight parts.
Related
- Proposals NewThe proposal each matrix belongs to.
- Proposal draftsThe same requirements laid out as a first draft.
- Key personnel NewThe positions the bid actually turns on.
- Past performance NewThe records a requirement can carry as its evidence.
- OpportunitiesThe notices this runs on.
- Sole sourceWhen there was never a solicitation to read.
See who was last awarded in your NAICS
Every code, every buying office, every vendor and every recompete, organized from the federal record and read nightly. Open it with a plan.