Twenty-seven feeds in. One record out. Five stages of your own work on top of it.
Reading a federal system once is easy, and a dozen products do it. The work is reading twenty-seven of them on a schedule, resolving the same company across all of them, joining them so one question reaches every one at once, and then carrying that record past the award into what you bid, what the job cost and what you actually won.
Every screen names the federal system its numbers came from and the date they were last rebuilt.
What every page on this site is standing on
What happens before you open it
Every one of these runs on a schedule and writes into the same record, which is the only reason one question can reach all of them.
- 1
Read every notice posted
Solicitations, sources sought, presolicitations, combined synopses, award notices and special notices, in every code rather than a watched shortlist. Buyer, NAICS, PSC, set-aside, response deadline, contacts and attachments are kept as published. The full notice text follows for notices still open, soonest deadline first.
- 2
Read the award history back to FY2001
Every contract award at every agency, loaded one fiscal year at a time, newest first, with buyer, vendor, value, obligated amount, period of performance and place of performance. Large awards and awards ending soon get a second pass that adds the competition detail, the option structure and the contracting office that ran it.
- 3
Read the newest contract actions, ahead of the spending record
Award data is published with a lag. A separate federal feed carries the newest actions with the office name and the offers received, so a deal signed last week is on the page before the spending record catches up. When the spending record does publish, the two are folded into one award rather than left as two.
- 4
Read who is registered, and who is barred
Active federal registrations give the legal name, the identifiers, the address, the NAICS list, the business types and the website. The exclusion list gives the companies and people who cannot be paid. Both are matched onto vendor records, so an excluded company says so on its own page rather than after you have built a team around it.
- 5
Read what labor is published at
The awarded hourly ceiling rate every company on a federal schedule is allowed to charge, by named job title. It is the only place in the whole federal record where price is published by role rather than by contract, which is what makes a services quote checkable at all.
- 6
Read the grant opportunities as well as the grant awards
The spending record carries assistance already paid out. The grant system carries the opportunities, including forecasted ones that have not been posted yet. No federal system holds both contract notices and grant opportunities, which is why anybody doing both kinds of work has had to watch two sites.
- 7
Read what is about to change the buying
Proposed and final rules including FAR and DFARS changes, the docket behind each one and whether its comment window is still open, and the bills, appropriations and authorizations moving through Congress. A proposed rule runs a year or more ahead of the solicitation it eventually produces.
- 8
Read what the Department asked for
The defense budget exhibits, line by line: procurement, research and development, and operation and maintenance. A budget line is a program somebody intends to buy before any notice exists, and comparing it against the bill that funds it is where a program survives or quietly stops.
- 9
Resolve every vendor to one record
Unique Entity ID first, then CAGE code, then a normalized name, in that order and never the other way round. Records that only match on a name are suggested rather than merged, and a person approves them. Merging keeps the old record as a pointer, so nothing is lost and a wrong merge can be undone.
- 10
Join it, score it and rebuild the pages
Awards ending inside the horizon become recompete rows with a score. Buyers roll up by agency, sub-agency and office. Orders attach to the vehicles that carry them. Rules and bills are tagged to the codes they touch, with the layer that made each tag written on it. Then every public page and every cached number is rebuilt and stamped with the date.
- 11
Match it against what you are watching
Every watch is checked against what actually changed on that run. Digests go out hourly, daily or weekly, and nothing is sent when nothing changed, because an alert that arrives every morning whether or not there is news stops being read inside a fortnight.
One record, not twenty-seven tabs
Each of these systems will answer a question about itself. None of them will answer a question about another one. The notice feed does not know who won the last contract like this, the spending record does not know a rule is about to change the specification, and no federal system anywhere knows that the company spelled four ways across all of them is one company in Ohio.
The join is the product. One NAICS code, one buying office, one company or one state reaches every feed at once and comes back as a single answer, which is the difference between twenty-seven places to look and somewhere to look.
- One code reaches the notices, the awards, the vehicles, the rates, the rules and the budget
- One company reaches every award, every registration, every vehicle and the exclusion list
- One office reaches what it buys, who it buys from, what it pays and who signs
- Every block names the federal system it came from, on the page, not in a footnote
every state the same size, so DC is readable
One vendor, however many ways the record spells it
A vendor appears in award data as whatever somebody typed, at the time, into the system of record. Over twenty-seven years that produces the legal name with and without the corporate suffix, a trading name, an abbreviation, a division, a parent, a merger and a handful of plain typos. Counting awards by raw name splits one company into five and hides the incumbent you needed to see.
So the identifier decides and the name only ever guesses. Two records carrying the same Unique Entity ID are the same business whatever the names say. With no identifier, a normalized name can suggest a match, and a suggestion waits for a person. When the evidence conflicts the records stay apart, because a false merge is worse than a missed one and it is much harder to notice.
the identifier decides, the name only guesses, and a guess waits for a person
What each feed holds, and where each one is weak
| Feed | What it holds | How often it is read | Where it is weak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contract opportunities SAM.gov | Every notice: solicitations, sources sought, presolicitations, combined synopses, awards and special notices. Buyer, NAICS, PSC, set-aside, deadline, attachments and named contacts. | Every hour, every code, with the full text for notices still open | A notice is what the buyer chose to write. Scope, quantity and the real evaluation weighting often live only in the attachments. |
| Contract awards SAM.gov | The newest contract actions across every code, with the contracting office, the set-aside and the offers received. | Daily, the newest actions | It is a window on the last few days rather than a history. It is read for recency and joined to the full record when that publishes. |
| Entity registrations SAM.gov | Active registrations: legal name, UEI, CAGE, address, NAICS list, business and socio-economic types, website. | By state, continuously | Only what the business chose to put in its own registration, and a lapsed registration disappears rather than being marked as lapsed. |
| Exclusions SAM.gov | Companies and people debarred, suspended or otherwise ineligible for federal work, with the agency and the dates. | Daily | It names the excluded party, not every affiliate. A clean parent with an excluded subsidiary shows as clean here. |
| Subcontract reports SAM.gov | Subcontract reports as the primes file them: who was hired under which prime contract, for how much, and the vehicle the prime contract sits under. | Daily | Filed by the prime, months behind the prime award, and small buys are not reported at all. A report the prime withdraws is taken off. |
| Contract spending USASpending | Award history at every agency back to FY2001: vendor, buyer, obligated and ceiling values, dates, place of performance, and on the detail pass the competition, options and office. | Nightly for changes, with the back years loaded one fiscal year at a time, newest first | Published with a lag of days to weeks, and the office name arrives only on the detail pass. Modifications restate an award rather than replacing it. |
| Assistance spending USASpending | Grant and other assistance awards: recipient, program, amount and period. | Nightly for changes | Money already committed. It says nothing about what is open, which is the other feed below. |
| Published labor rates GSA CALC | The awarded hourly ceiling rate by named job title for companies on a federal schedule, with education and experience minimums. About 450,000 rates. | Nightly | A ceiling, not a transaction price. Titles are the schedule holder's own, so two firms can publish the same work under two names. |
| Grant opportunities Grants.gov | Open and forecasted grant opportunities with the agency, the eligibility, the funding ceiling and the close date. | Daily | Forecast entries are an intention with a date attached, and the date moves. They are labelled as forecasts rather than folded in with posted opportunities. |
| Rules and notices Federal Register | Every proposed rule, final rule and notice: what it amends, the clauses it names, the effective date and the comment deadline. FAR and DFARS changes included. | Daily | The document knows nothing about NAICS codes. The connection to your work is made here, and every tag says how confident it is. |
| Dockets and comments Regulations.gov | The docket each rule sits in, the comments filed on it and the authoritative answer to whether the window is still open. | Daily | Not every agency posts comments promptly, and a docket can be open with nothing in it yet. |
| Bills and laws Congress.gov | Appropriations, defense authorization, procurement and small business bills, with the stage each one has reached and what was enacted. | Daily | A bill is intent until it is enacted, and the money still has to be apportioned and obligated after that. |
| Budget exhibits DoD Comptroller | The P-1, R-1 and O-1 exhibits: procurement, research and development, and operation and maintenance, line by line, as requested. | Each release, and on change | It is the request rather than the appropriation, and lines get renamed, merged and split between years. |
| Assistance listings SAM.gov | Each grant program as the agency describes it: what it is for, who may apply, what it obligates in a year and the law it is made under. | Whole once, what changed since every month, and whole again every six months | It is the agency's own description, and an estimate in it is the agency's, made before the year ended. |
| Product and service codes SAM.gov | Each product and service code as its keeper describes it: what the code takes in, what it leaves out, the code above it and whether it is still in use. | Whole once, what changed since every month, and whole again every six months | The same four characters have meant two things over the years. The meaning in use is shown and the earlier ones are kept beside it. |
| Per diem rates GSA per diem | What is allowed for a night of lodging and a day of meals, by place and by month, for each fiscal year. | This fiscal year and the next every month, and each earlier year once | GSA sets these for the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia only. A rate is what is allowed, not what a hotel will charge. |
| SEC filings SEC EDGAR | For a contractor that is listed on an exchange: its revenue, its net income and its latest annual, quarterly and current reports. | The list of listed companies every month, and each matched company every thirty days | A privately held contractor files nothing. A listed company is tied by its name to its registrations here, and to the companies that name it as their parent. Where that would be a guess it is not tied, so some listed companies are not. |
| Decisions of the Court of Federal Claims GovInfo | Bid protests and contract cases the court has decided, one row an opinion, each opening the court's own document. | Daily for what was added or changed. The years back to 2004 first, then earlier years one at a time | Most protests are decided at the Government Accountability Office and are not here. A case is called a protest only when the court's own coding says so. |
| Lobbying filings of the Senate and the House LDA.gov | Each filing: the firm, the client, the issues, the government bodies contacted and what was reported as paid or spent. | Daily, the filings posted in the last ten days. Earlier years one reporting period at a time | Lobbying is disclosed by issue and by body, not by contract. The names of lobbyists are not kept. |
| Notice archive SAM.gov | Every notice SAM.gov has archived, one file a fiscal year, text and all. | Read whole once, and the list of files checked every month | A closed notice is what was posted. The award that came from it is found by the solicitation number, and some notices name none. |
| Other transactions SAM.gov | Other transaction agreements, orders and IDVs, each marked on the award it belongs to. | Each new one daily, the history a month at a time | Only SAM.gov publishes them. USASpending carries none, so a total read from it alone leaves them out. |
| Wage determinations SAM.gov | The least each occupation must be paid on a service or construction contract, by county, with the fringe. | Daily for what changed, and the whole list every month | The rates are read from the text of each determination. The one named in your solicitation is the one that binds you. |
| Contract announcements Department of War | Every contract of $7.5 million or more, the business day it is announced, with the company, the amount and the contract number. | Every three hours | Only contracts of $7.5 million or more, and the amount announced may be a ceiling rather than what was obligated. |
| SBIR and STTR awards SBIR.gov | Every award made under the two research programs since they began, by company, agency, phase and year. | Read whole, then looked at every month | An award whose company carries no identifier is not tied to a company page. |
| SBIR and STTR topics SBIR.gov | The research topics open now, with the agency asking, the phase and the day each one closes. | Daily | A topic is applied for on SBIR.gov and the agency site it names, not here. |
| Occupational wages Bureau of Labor Statistics | What each occupation is paid and how many hold it, by state and by metropolitan area. | Looked at every month; published once a year | Estimates for all employers and all industries, a year or more behind the market, and some figures are withheld. |
| Cloud products FedRAMP Marketplace | Every cloud product with an authorization or on the way to one, its level, its company and the agencies using it. | Daily | An authorization is a security decision about a product, not a contract to buy it. |
Twenty-seven feeds, sixteen systems. Every page shows the date its numbers were last rebuilt, and every figure links back to the government's own record so you can check it.
Some of it is published late, and the page says so
An award is signed weeks before the spending record shows it. That is the source publishing on its own schedule, and no product can fix it. What a product can do is stop pretending otherwise.
So the newest contract actions are read from a second feed that carries them within days, and folded into the full award when it eventually publishes. Where a number is still incomplete the page says which feed it came from and when it was last rebuilt, rather than showing a partial figure as a finished one. A code with nothing on record yet says that in words instead of drawing a zero.
If an award you know about is missing, it has usually not been published yet. Check the federal record directly, and tell us if it is there and we missed it.
the gap is the source publishing late, so the page says which feed it heard from and when
Five stages, and the same record underneath all of them
Everything above is what the product knows. This is what you do with it, and the last three are where most of this market stops.
- 1
Find it
Watch your codes, your buying offices, your states and your set-asides. Open notices arrive by digest. Recompetes appear a year before the end date with the incumbent named. The rules and the budget lines arrive earlier still, which is the only part of this that is genuinely early rather than merely fast.
- 2
Decide
Before writing anything, read the history under the notice: who this office bought from before, how many offers they got, whether it was set aside, what it went for and who signs. That is a bid or no bid decision made on the record rather than on a feeling, and it is the cheapest hour in the whole cycle.
- 3
Price it
Roles, hours and salaries in. Your own indirect rates applied in the order they actually apply: fringe on direct labor, overhead on labor plus fringe, general and administrative on the base you elected, fee on the total. Out comes the price and the wrap rate, then it is read twice against the record: the total placed on the band this office has actually paid, and every role checked against what that role is published at.
- 4
Settle the outcome
Pursuits get an outcome, and the outcome is reconciled against the award record rather than against your memory of it. Win rate is counted only over pursuits that were actually settled, by code, by office and by the type of work, so the number means something. Losing to the same incumbent three times is a pattern worth seeing written down.
- 5
Get paid
The contract goes on a ledger with its CLINs, its funding actions and its costs. Timesheets, pay runs and a cost ledger sit behind it, and the indirect rates are worked out from them. Burn is measured against days worked rather than the calendar. The limitation of funds notice has a date on it before it is late. Costs are corrected with a reason attached rather than quietly overwritten, and what you bid sits beside what the work actually cost.
The number that decides whether to bid is your own
Two screens already answered what the work goes for and what a named role is published at. Neither answered the question that actually decides it, which is what your number has to be.
It prices the term rather than the year: a base period and its options, each with its own length, its own escalation on labor and on everything else, and its own level of effort. Escalation compounds, which is the part that is got wrong by hand, and the screen states what the same term would have cost with none, so a bid quoted flat is visible as a cost you are absorbing rather than as a keener price.
The worksheet takes the staffing plan and your indirect rates, typed in or taken from the rate sets your own books work out, and applies them in the order the pools actually stack, because swapping two of them changes the answer and it is the thing most spreadsheets get wrong. Then it does the part a spreadsheet cannot: it places the total on the band of what this buying office has really paid for work like this, and checks every role on the plan against the published rate for that role, because a price can be right in total and lose on one line.
Nothing is stored until you press save, and no worksheet ever enters a figure this product publishes.
each pool sits on the total under it, which is why the order is not a style choice
The award is the middle of the job, not the end of it
Winning is where the tools in this market hand you back to a spreadsheet. The ledger carries the contract instead: CLINs, funding actions, costs as incurred, and the actual indirect rates against the provisional ones you billed at, with the year end true-up written out rather than discovered.
It knows which contract types bill cost as incurred and which do not, so the screen asks for what the type needs and nothing else. It watches the funded value against the spend and puts a date on the limitation of funds notice before the clause is breached. Every correction to a recorded cost takes a reason and keeps the old value, because that is what an auditor asks for and nobody reconstructs it afterwards.
the money is moving at twice the rate of the clock, and the notice has a date on it
Every page says what it is for
There is a lot in the app, and none of it has to be learned at once. Every page says what it is for. The App guide, under Knowledge in the menu, walks every page in order, from setting up to closing out a contract: what each one is for, what you can do there and where to go next. It is on every plan, and in the live demo.
What the AI does, and what it is never allowed to do
AI reads and it writes. It does not count, and it never produces a number that appears on this site.
It tags a new notice by work type, process, material and supplier fit. It writes a plain reading of a notice, a rule or an award record on request, from that document's own published text. Where the first two tagging layers find nothing, it suggests NAICS codes for a rule, and every code it returns is checked against the real 2022 table first, so an invented code is dropped rather than shown.
In a proposal draft it can write one part from passages of your own documents. That is optional, and it is off until the owner of the account or a manager turns it on. The security page says what it sends.
Every figure you see is arithmetic on the federal record: totals, counts, percentiles, bands, scores and dates. Turn AI off entirely and the counting, the resolution, the recompete table, the alerts and every page on this site work exactly as they do now. What you lose is the reading and the tagging, which is the right thing to lose, because those are the two jobs where being wrong is visible and being slow is not.
A tag made by AI says so on the screen, in words, everywhere it appears, including in an export. A spreadsheet that drops the layer turns a guess into a fact the moment it leaves the product.
How fresh any given answer is
We check SAM.gov for new notices every hour. Award changes are read nightly. The newest contract actions are read daily. Rules, dockets and bills are read daily. Labor rates are read nightly. Vendor resolution, the recompete table, the buyer roll-ups and every cached number on a public page are rebuilt on the same nightly run, so the page and the figures on it are never from two different days.
Every live block carries the date it was last rebuilt, on the block, not in the small print. The status page says the same thing for the whole product, and how the data is pulled walks through the order it happens in.
What the record means before you read anything into it
Obligated is money the government has actually committed on an award so far. Base and all options is the ceiling if every option is exercised, which is a very different number and the one most often quoted as the deal size. End date is the current period of performance end; potential end date includes options nobody has exercised yet. Offers received is what the contracting officer recorded, and one offer on a competed award usually means the requirement was written narrowly. Set-aside is the code the buyer used, as published. Place of performance is where the work happens, not where the vendor sits.
A modification restates an award rather than replacing it, so the value you remember and the value on the page can both be right about different moments. The guide to reading award records goes field by field.
The methods, each one written out
Nothing here is a black box. Every judgment the product makes on your behalf has a page saying how it is made and what it refuses to do.
Entity resolution
How five spellings become one vendor, and when two records are deliberately left apart.
Read more →The recompete score
What pushes a recompete up the list and what pushes it down, in words, with the weights named.
Read more →Tagging a rule to a code
The three layers that connect a federal rule to the work you actually do, and how much to trust each one.
Read more →Data and sources
Coverage, freshness and the boundaries, feed by feed, with a link to every government system named.
Read more →How the data is pulled
The order the reading happens in, what is read first when there is a backlog, and why.
Read more →Security
What is stored, where your documents are kept, who can read them, and what happens when an account closes.
Read more →The boundary
Nothing enters the record from any employer, any private contact list or any conversation. Every figure this product publishes is read from an official federal source. That is a design rule rather than a policy statement, and it is the reason you can trust that what you are looking at is what anybody else could see if they did the work. What you add to your own account, a bid, a cost or a document, stays in that account and never enters a published figure.
Questions about the machinery
How do I know a number on a page is right?
Every figure is arithmetic on the federal record, and every record links back to the government system it came from. Open the link and check it. Where a figure is a judgment rather than a count, such as a recompete score or a price band, the method has its own page and the page says what the method refuses to do.
An award I know about is not here. Why?
Almost always because the source has not published it yet. Awards reach the spending record days to weeks after signature, and the second feed closes most but not all of that gap. If the award is visible in the federal record and missing here, use the contact page with the award identifier and it will be checked against the source.
Two records are obviously the same company. Can that be fixed?
Yes. Say so and a person reviews the merge. Merging moves every award onto one record and keeps the old one as a pointer, so nothing is lost and it can be undone. Inside a merged company every registration, every identifier and every location stays separable, so you can still see which part of the business holds what.
Is my own data mixed into anything public?
No, and this is structural rather than a promise. Watchlists, pursuits, bid worksheets, contract costs and library documents are yours. No worksheet, cost or pursuit is ever counted into a price band, a win rate, a score or any figure this site publishes. Those are built only from the federal record.
What happens if I turn AI off?
Everything that counts keeps working: the feeds, the resolution, the recompete table, the bands, the alerts and every public page. You lose the written readings and the automatic tagging of new notices. No number changes, because AI never produced one.
Can I get the data out?
Yes. The main lists export as Excel and CSV on paid plans, up to the rows a month your plan sets, with the source link and, for anything tagged, the layer that made the tag. Your own bids, contracts, invoices, timesheets, rate sets, pipeline and calendar export to Excel and CSV, and most of them print; your own work is never counted against the monthly rows. Larger plans get an API. Exporting is a feature rather than a favor, because a product you cannot leave is a product you cannot check.
Does this cover state and local contracting?
No, and it is not planned. State and local work is thousands of separate municipal sites rather than a federal system, and covering it badly would undermine the one claim this product makes, which is that every figure traces to a named federal record.
Read next
- See it working on real dataThe real app on one code, read only, without an account.
- Everything in one placeWhat the join actually looks like on one screen.
- The courseFederal contracting start to finish, in sixteen modules, if the vocabulary on this page is new.
- All featuresEvery screen, one page each.
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. Start on one code with no card. A plan opens every code.
Try the live demo The real app on one code. No email needed.