Every other tool lists work. This lists the paths to it.
The way in has two tabs. The first ranks targets, each one a code at a buying office. This is the second: the paths a code travels. You make a thing, you are somewhere, you are a size, and an office over there spends money on what you make. The question is what sequence of moves ends with you being paid. That is a path through a graph rather than a filter over a list.
who already passes work down in your code from subaward reporting, filed by the prime
Sorted by whether you can get there, not by how much is there
Rank federal work by size and you have handed a small supplier a list of the places they are least likely to get into. Every product in this category does it anyway, because size is the easy number.
Each route here carries a friction instead: an estimate, in the same units for every route, of how hard that particular way in is to walk. Friction adds up along a path, which is the property that lets two completely different routes be compared at all, and it turns into a reachability out of 99 so you can read it at a glance. The arithmetic is printed on every route.
- Compete directly, where the office has actually taken on somebody new
- Subcontract to a prime who already pays subs in your code and already wins there
- Get onto the multiple-award vehicle the office orders through
- Or learn that the only way in is a recompete, and when it is
the filter nobody else offers is the last one
It only works if a company is one company in five different files
The subaward file spells a prime one way. The contract file spells the same prime another way. The vehicle record is a third spelling, the registrant directory a fourth, and the exclusion list a fifth. Join those on raw names and the graph you get is mostly wrong in a way that does not announce itself, which is worse than not having one.
Resolving one company to one record across every one of those files was built here first, for other reasons, over months. It is what turns five unrelated federal files into a single graph you can walk. That is the whole moat, and it is not a feature anybody ships in a quarter.
UEI, CAGE, then normalized name
What each kind of route costs to walk
| Route | What it costs | Why that number |
|---|---|---|
| Compete directly | Whatever this office's openness says | The openness score already measures how often this office buys from somebody it has never bought from. An office that never does is not a route, whatever it spends. |
| Subcontract to a prime | Falls as the prime's subcontractor count rises | A prime that has paid forty different subcontractors in your code has a door. One that has paid the same two has a relationship. The tenth name tells you far more than the fortieth, so the credit grows with the logarithm rather than the count. |
| Get onto a vehicle | A fixed cost you can start paying today | A multiple-award vehicle adds holders. Most federal money is ordered against a contract competed years ago, so a supplier watching only notices is watching the wrong surface. |
| Wait for a recompete | The waiting itself | A single-award vehicle is not a route until it is recompeted. Pricing it as the time until that date is more honest than listing it beside things you could act on this week. |
| Any route that has gone quiet | Marked up by how long ago | An edge that last carried money in 2019 is not a route, and the record says exactly when each one last moved. |
| Work far above your size | Marked up, never hidden | A firm whose largest win is eighty thousand dollars is not one proposal away from a forty million dollar programme. It is marked as a reach and left on the list, because a reach is a decision and not an error. |
| Through an excluded party | Removed | Not high friction. Not a path. |
It will tell you when there is no way in, and when it cannot say yet
A path is built from three records: how open each office is, who reports paying a subcontractor, and which vehicles carry the code. When all three have been read for a code and none shows a path, the screen says there is no way in from here, with the reason: no office in the code has taken on a new supplier, no prime in it subcontracts, and no multiple-award vehicle carries it.
When one of the three has not been read for the code, the screen says "Not on record yet" and names what is missing. That says nothing about whether there is a way in, and the screen says so.
Only the first of those is a finding about the market. It is worth more than a list of contracts you would not have won. A route engine that always finds a route is a random number generator with good manners.
Related
- The way inThe screen this tab is on, and the openness score each direct path is priced from.
- SubawardsThe prime to subcontractor edges.
- Vehicles and IDIQsThe contracts the orders are written against.
- Entity resolutionWhy one company has to be one company first.
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.