Most small contractors have no contracts department. This is what one knows
A company with twenty people in business development has somebody whose whole job is to read the terms, send the notices on time and close the contract out. A company with two has none of that, and signs the same clauses. The handbook is that knowledge, in the app, beside the record it applies to.
A guide to practice. It is not legal or accounting advice, and the words in your own contract decide.
a score with no reasons is a horoscope
What it is
One hundred and thirty-nine pages in eleven sections, laid out the way a large contracts department keeps its own manual, with the forms at the back. Each page gives a policy, a procedure and what to keep: what the company has decided it will always do, the steps in order, and the record that proves it was done.
It opens from Learn, as The handbook. One box finds a page by a word: novation, stop work, data rights, letter of credit.
What it holds
| Part | Covers |
|---|---|
| Purpose and the Contracts Manager | Whom the book binds, who may commit the company and the government, and the duties of the role at each stage. |
| General information | Nondisclosure and teaming agreements, memoranda and letters of intent, the conflict of interest check, revenue recognition step by step, and working capital. |
| The terms of a contract | How to read a contract, and twenty-two provisions one at a time: acceptance, applicable law, changes, consequential damages, disputes, force majeure, indemnification, liability, liquidated damages, payments, termination, warranty and the rest. |
| Proposals and negotiations | The work before a solicitation, reading one when it comes, a compliant offer with its sign-off, and a negotiation in seven steps, with the check made before cost or pricing data are certified. |
| Administration | Correspondence, the contract file, modifications, novation, a change of name, stop-work orders, both kinds of termination, and closeout. |
| Programs with rules of their own | Cost accounting standards, rated orders, past performance, the GSA Schedule, indefinite delivery contracts, incentive contracts and commercial buying. |
| Commercial contracting | The Uniform Commercial Code, the international sales convention, signing, letters of intent, conditional offers, the battle of the forms, reserving rights, and a ten-point final review. |
| Universities and state agencies | What differs when the customer is a university or a state or local agency. |
| International contracting | Nineteen subjects, from acceptance and sell-off to tendering, with letters of credit and guarantees, foreign military sales and financing, and direct commercial sales; then the gates of an international pursuit. |
| References and compliance | The sources the book rests on, how it is written, and how the company shows it follows it. |
| Forms | The records the procedures call for, each one short. |
A federal page names the clause, and the clause opens
The federal pages state what the regulation and the clauses say, and name the place. A clause number on a page opens the text of that clause in the clause library, so the sentence can be checked against its source in one step.
Where a clause gives a number of days, the page gives it: thirty days to assert an adjustment after a change order, ninety days of a stop-work order, one year for a termination settlement proposal. A dollar threshold is named by the place that sets it, because thresholds are raised and a printed figure goes stale.
- The notices that protect the right to be paid, and when each is due
- What to do the day a stop-work order or a termination notice arrives
- What to mark, and how, to keep rights in data and software
- The steps and the two dates that close out a cost type contract
checked before a teaming partner is ever suggested
What it is and what it is not
| It is | It is not |
|---|---|
| A desk reference for the person who reads the terms and keeps the file. | Legal or accounting advice. It says when to call a lawyer or an accountant. |
| Written from the regulation as codified, with the part and the clause cited. | A reading of your contract. Your contract may carry another version of a clause, or a term written for you alone. |
| A set of policies to start from and change to fit your company. | A promise that a term can be negotiated. In a competitive federal buy most cannot. |
Where a page and the regulation, the clause or your own contract disagree, they are right and the page is wrong.
Make it the book of how your company works
On a paid plan the handbook can be made the company's own. The owner, the managers and anybody whose role is given the handbook can rename, reorder and hide sections and pages, add pages of their own, and rewrite any page with a toolbar and a live preview. A draft is kept every ten seconds while somebody writes.
Every version of every page is kept and can be restored, two versions can be compared side by side or word by word, and a page whose published text changed after your company made its copy says so. Pages can be marked as policy, procedure, template or lessons learned, and found by that mark. The whole company handbook prints as one document. The published book is never changed by any of it, and a switch reads it as published.
- Everybody on the account reads the company's handbook
- Every change is written to the account's history
- Procedures, policies, templates and lessons learned, each found by its mark
UEI, CAGE, then normalized name
Your own words in the Glossary
The Glossary in the app holds the terms of notices, awards and clauses, and beside them the terms your company adds of its own: program names, a customer's acronyms, what your contracts office means by a phrase. Each is marked as whose it is, on one A to Z list. The owner or a manager can also hide a published term from the account or write the company's own note under it. Every change is kept in the account's history.
Where it is in the app
Handbook, under Knowledge in the menu. Knowledge is the part of LastAwarded that teaches the organization, one of the eight parts.
Related
- The clause libraryThe words of every clause the handbook names.
- The course NewFederal contracting from the beginning, in sixteen modules.
- The contract ledger NewFunding, burn and invoices for each contract you hold.
- Pipeline and calendarEach pursuit, and every date you have to meet.
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.