Frequently asked questions

Because we only show what the federal record can prove, and the federal record is narrower than your actual business. Capability evidence comes from three places: the award language on prime contracts, the government's own scope documents (the PWS, SOW, SOO or Section C behind a solicitation) where we can read one, and subcontracts your primes chose to report. So work you performed as a sub under a non-reporting prime, classified or intelligence-community work, and all of your commercial business are invisible to us. Depth also varies a lot company to company — a company whose contracts came with a readable scope document has a much more detailed profile than one whose awards are described in two lines, and that difference is about what got published, not about the work. A thin capability panel is a statement about federal reporting coverage, not a judgment about your company. If it's thin and you know why, tell us via Feedback — that's genuinely useful to us.

No, and we’re deliberate about never claiming it is. The federal data window doesn’t reach back to a company’s founding, so the oldest award we can see is the oldest award *in the period we can see* — not the first one ever won. A company registered in SAM in 2011 whose earliest visible award is 2019 may have been priming for years before that, or subbing the whole time. You’ll see us phrase this as "earliest award in the period analyzed," never "first award," and our AI-written sections are explicitly barred from making a first-award or market-entry claim.

Federal subaward reporting is incomplete government-wide — it depends on each prime contractor filing its subawards, and many don’t, or file partially. This is not a gap specific to us; it’s a gap in the source. Practically, it means a company that has quietly subbed under the same prime for years can show close to nothing in our capability evidence and revenue figures. Read a low sub number as "not visible in federal reporting," never as "didn’t happen."

Click the Feedback button in the top-right of any page. Nothing is pre-selected, so pick Bug first, then describe what looked wrong — the company name or contract number plus the figure is enough — and click Submit Feedback. You don't need to say where you were; the page, your account, and session details are attached automatically. You'll get a ticket number on the confirmation screen, but it closes itself after a couple of seconds — note the number down if you want to reference it later. During beta this is the fastest path to us and the one we're actively watching; a wrong number with a specific ID attached is the single most valuable thing you can send.

Usually not. A profile can honestly show no visible federal award activity when the company’s work sits entirely outside what public federal reporting captures — sub work not reported by the prime, classified or IC programs, or purely commercial business. Rather than fabricate a trend or leave the panel blank, the profile carries a fixed "visibility note" saying exactly that. If you believe the company genuinely has prime awards we’re not showing, that’s a real bug and we want the report — use Feedback and include the company name.

It's a fixed, human-written disclosure that appears when a company's federally visible evidence is thin. It says the profile reflects federally reported activity only, that the company's actual scope of work may be substantially larger than what's shown, and that this reflects a limitation of federal reporting rather than an assessment of the company. It is never AI-written and never varies company to company — it's the same sentence every time, on purpose.

Because labor hours come from a separate filing the contractor makes each year — the Service Contract Inventory — and roughly half of the contracts subject to that requirement actually file. The threshold is also high in places (DoD's is $3M), so plenty of real, staffed work never appears there at all. When there's no filing we show the chip No Service Contract Report Data Available rather than a zero, because "nobody reported it" and "nobody worked it" are different facts and we won't render one as the other. If you know a contract filed and we're not showing it, send us the contract number via Feedback.

No — right now they're a cycle behind, and we'd rather say so than let you assume they're in step. Prime contract award data reflects the federal release we loaded in August 2026. The subaward side is still on a July 2026 load: that refresh was deferred when the government's own subaward export service failed repeatedly, and it's scheduled to catch up on the September cycle. So a subcontract filed in July or later may not be visible yet even though the prime award on the same contract is. This is a refresh-timing gap on our side, separate from the government-wide under-reporting of subawards described above — both can be in play on the same company.

Four sources, and the profile labels which one each item came from. The strongest is a government scope document — the PWS, SOW, SOO or Section C we read from the solicitation behind an award, where the government itself wrote out what it was buying. Next is the award record's own description of the work, which is what most federal awards carry and is often only a line or two. Below that is sub-performed work, where the company appears in a prime's own subaward filing. Separately, and weakest, is vehicle scope — capability language inherited from the scope statement of a contract vehicle the company holds a seat on; that one carries a sentence saying how many other holders of the same vehicle could make the identical claim, and it never counts as covering a gap in Gap Analysis. Two companies can genuinely differ in depth purely because a scope document was published for one and not the other. Coverage is also growing quickly: as we read more scope documents, profiles get more specific over time without the company doing anything.

Click the blue circle with the magnifying glass in the top-right of any page — it sits just left of the round ? help button — or press ⌘K on a Mac, Ctrl-K anywhere else, from wherever you are. There's also a search box on your dashboard directly above MY PURSUITS, and the page itself is at /search. Type three characters or more and it searches eight record types at once: companies by name, companies by capability, contracts, opportunities, customers, IDIQ vehicles, OTAs, and J&As. Companies appears twice on purpose — one card finds a company you can already name, the other finds companies by the work they do — so a search like cybersecurity returns both the firm with that word in its name and the firms with federal evidence of doing it. Before you type, the Start Here tiles under the box say in one line what each of those eight actually holds — useful the first few times, and they clear out of the way as soon as you start typing, then come back if you empty the box. The keyboard shortcut deliberately does nothing while your cursor is in a text box, so it can never interrupt you mid-sentence.

Because a company, a contract and a solicitation aren't the same kind of thing, and ranking them against each other would mean inventing a judgment about which one matters more to you. Each record type gets its own card with its own count — "3 of 47" — and a See all link that carries your search into that surface's full search. Above the cards, a line tells you how many of the eight groups matched and names the ones that didn't, so an empty group is stated rather than quietly missing. One thing that's deliberate: if your plan doesn't include a record type, that group simply doesn't appear, and it reads exactly like a group that found nothing — the count is always out of eight either way, so the page never turns into a list of what you don't have.

Often, yes. A federal registration carries a legal business name and, separately, a "doing business as" name, and the two are frequently nothing alike — so matching only the legal name misses companies you know by their operating name. Company name search now also matches the DBA name as filed in SAM. That match runs across the federal registry, so it most often surfaces companies that don't have a full profile with us yet: they come back under "Search the federal registry" beneath the results, labelled so you can see the match came from the operating name rather than the legal one. Wherever a DBA appears, the registered legal name stays the primary label with the operating name beneath it — the federal record is the identity, and the trade name is a label on top of it. If you search an operating name and still come up empty, send us both names via Feedback.

It's a basic identity page for a company that's registered in SAM but doesn't have a full profile with us yet. We hold the federal registry in full — around 888,000 registered entities as of the August 2026 file — so a search can hand you a real company rather than a dead end. The page shows what the registration itself says: legal name, any DBA, UEI and CAGE, city and state, whether the registration is active or expired, how long they've been registered and when it renews, their website and primary NAICS. If they show up as a subcontractor on reported awards, those are listed too, with the prime, the agency and the fiscal year — and where a prime reported the relationship but no dollar figure, that cell stays blank rather than showing a zero. You reach one from a company search that came back empty, under "Search the federal registry", or from the SAM Registry card in universal search. Two things to know: there's no watchlist star on these pages yet, and a company that does have a full profile will always send you there instead.

Because we have no record of it holding a federal prime contract inside the window we track. Full profiles are built from award history — the capability, customer and contract record that accumulates once a company primes federal work — so a company that has only ever subcontracted, or that registered recently, has none of that on the public record yet, even though the work is real. The page says this on its face rather than leaving you to infer it: it's a statement about what gets reported to the federal government, not a judgment about the company. Subcontract reporting is partial everywhere, and a prime that doesn't report its subs makes their work invisible to us — so a thin page is more often a reporting gap than a quiet company. If you know a company has prime awards we aren't showing, that's a real bug and we want the name via Feedback.

Open the company's profile and click the star button captioned WATCH in the identity header next to the company name — it fills gold when the company is on your list. You can also star companies directly from search-result rows without opening each profile. Click it again to remove. Everything you star lands on your Watchlist.

Click the gold Watchlist chip in the top-right of the nav bar. It lists every company you've starred with its location, average federal revenue, when you added it, and how many notes you've written on it — searchable by company name, UEI, or city. Clicking a company name opens its full profile in a new tab so you don't lose your place in the list.

On the company's profile, click the NOTES button in the identity header next to the star. A capture-notes drawer slides in. Type your note in the "Add a capture note…" box (markdown formatting works), optionally pick a relationship tag from the dropdown, and click Add Note. Every note starts private — see "How do I share a note with my team?" for the other option. The tag list is specific to what you're looking at: on a company it's Competitor, Teaming Partner, Incumbent, or Customer-Adjacent; on a contract, an opportunity or an IDIQ vehicle it's a pursuit posture instead — Our Contract, Competitor Award, Pursuing — Prime, Pursuing — Sub, Teaming — Role TBD, Watching, or No-Bid; customer offices, OT awards and consortia each have their own short list. If you opened the company from a specific vehicle's report, the note is auto-tagged with that vehicle; remove the tag if the note is evergreen company intel instead.

Yes — notes are on every record type now: companies, contracts, customer offices, IDIQ vehicles, OT awards, opportunities, and consortia. The control sits wherever that page already keeps its per-record buttons. On a contract it's the Notes pill in the row at the top, right after Track pursuit. On a company or a customer office it's the boxy NOTES button in the identity header next to the star. On an opportunity it's in the header group next to PURSUE. On an IDIQ vehicle, an OT award, or a consortium it's beside the record's name. All of them open the same drawer with the same controls, and most of them show a running count on the button once there's something to count. Justifications are the one gap: there's no single-record page to write a note against.

Every note starts private. In the note drawer, the Private | Team toggle sits next to the role dropdown — flip it to Team before you click Add Note and the note is shared the moment it saves. To share something you already wrote, click the people icon on that note's own row. Either way you get a confirmation step first, because this is a deliberate privacy break: the note goes to your whole organization exactly as written, with your name and the timestamp on it. A shared note then carries a gold Team badge; a private one just says Private. To reverse it, click the lock icon on your own shared note — that takes effect immediately with no confirmation, and the drawer tells you plainly if anyone had already been emailed about it.

In the note drawer, click Mention someone under the compose box — or just type @ — and pick a name from your organization's roster. To mention someone on a note you already wrote, use the @ icon on that note's row. They get an email pointing straight at the record, and a small blue dot appears on their gold Notes chip in the nav until they open the @Mentions tab. One thing to know before you do it on a private note: mentioning someone makes that note visible to your whole organization, not just to them — there is no way to show one note to one colleague — so the platform stops and asks you to confirm that specifically. The roster lists the active people on your account only.

Open the company profile and click + Assign owner in the identity header, between the Notes button and Export Profile, then pick a name — your own included. Once it's set the chip shows that person's short name, and Change owner and Unassign both live inside the same popover. It's a shared label for your organization, not a permission: an owner doesn't gate anyone's access to anything, and everyone on the account can still watch, note and export that company exactly as before. If the assigned person is no longer active on your account the chip says so rather than quietly showing a stale name. Ownership is on company records only — no other record type carries it today.

Click the gold Notes chip in the top-right nav. That's your notes hub — every note you've written, on every kind of record, searchable by record name or note text. Narrow it with the record-type chips along the top, each carrying its own count, and the filters beneath: a specific record, a role tag, a vehicle, an owner, private versus shared, a date range. Then click Export CSV or Export DOCX. Both export the currently filtered view, and the count in the button tells you exactly how many notes you're about to export.

No, and that's deliberate. The hub is your own capture journal — every note you wrote, on every kind of record, including the ones you chose to share. Your teammates' shared notes live on the record itself: open the company, contract or office and the drawer shows the team's shared notes alongside your private ones, with All / Mine / Team to switch between them. The one place a teammate's note reaches you directly in the hub is the @Mentions tab at the top, which lists the notes where somebody named you. Put simply: the hub answers "what have I written," and the record answers "what does the team know about this."

Open the contract profile and click Track pursuit — the first button in the row at the top, next to Compare against incumbent. It flips to Tracking ✓ and turns gold. Everything you track lands on Pursuits, the gold chip in the top-right nav between Watchlist and Notes, which is your list of contracts you're going after with the clock on each one. Two things follow from tracking a contract: it's what the monthly What changed digest watches for you, and each row on the Pursuits list carries a shortcut straight into a Recompete Brief for it. Click the button again to stop tracking. Watchlist is for companies; Pursuits is for contracts — two separate lists, on purpose.

Gap Analysis can assist your initial teaming decisions — and it works just as well pointed the other way: load a competitor's known team and see what the federal record says about them. Our goal is a fact-based vantage point into any team's federally documented capabilities. It measures demonstrated capability evidence against a specific contract or buying office, requirement by requirement. Coverage is a dollar ratio, not a score. It shows what the federal record supports and stops there: no fit scores, no recommendations. You decide who to call.

In the top nav, open Intelligence Tools and pick Gap Analysis. In the first row, add 1–5 companies to "My Team" (start with your own in the first slot — the boxes are labelled "My Team 1," "My Team 2," and so on). Then, under TARGET FRAME, pick Contract Pursuit and search for the contract or program you’re chasing, or Customer Pursuit and search for the buying office. Click Find Gaps →. You’ll get a requirement-by-requirement coverage matrix, plus a ranked Teaming Options list of companies that could fill what your team doesn’t cover. Faster route: from any contract profile, click Find teaming partners and the target is pre-filled for you.

They're a dollar ratio against the requirement's own recorded value: under 50% is a gap (red), 50–99% is partial (yellow), 100% or more is covered (green). There's now a fourth, grey state — Unknown — explained in the next entry. Two things the colors do *not* mean. First, a red row doesn't mean your team can't do the work — it means the visible federal record doesn't show that work as a prime, under a code the extraction caught, inside the visible window. Second, the Incumbent column is that company's whole portfolio-wide, family-rolled federal record, not what they've delivered on this specific contract — read a big incumbent number as "how real a company this is," not "how hard they'll fight for this award." Sanity-check any hard gap against what you actually know before you act on it.

Because on that pursuit we're reading the government's own scope document — a detailed, requirement-by-requirement list — while the company we're checking is only visible to us through award descriptions, which are much coarser. Calling that a gap would be us asserting something we can't actually see. So the row goes grey and says Unknown, it's excluded from the gap count, and it's excluded from the teaming suggestions. It is not a small gap and it is not a pass: it means our visibility isn't deep enough to judge that row, and your team already knows whether you do that work. This state is getting less common fast — the number of companies we can see deeply enough to call a gap on grew by more than thirty times in late August 2026 as we read more scope documents, so a screen that came back mostly grey a few weeks ago is worth re-running. The same row can honestly change from Unknown to red later, and that's the mechanism working, not a number moving under you.

Open Intelligence Tools in the top nav and pick Compare. Use the Companies tab to pick 2–5 companies yourself. Or use Vs. Field: pick one anchor company, then click Show Peers → to pull in the companies ranked near it on the Leaderboard. The Vs. Contract tab is launched from a contract profile’s Compare against incumbent button rather than picked here — it pre-fills the incumbent and the contract’s own requirements. There’s also a NAICS tab if you want to frame the comparison around a market code. Compare shows evidence side by side — capability, rank, vehicles, customer overlap — with no fit score and no verdict, by design.

New in beta. It's one contract's recompete decision on a single page — the clock, the government's own scope language and requirements, the incumbent's footprint at that office, price framing where labor hours were reported, dated activity on the record, and which other companies have demonstrated the same capability. Three ways in: the Recompete Brief → button at the top of any contract profile, the Recompete Brief row in the Intelligence Tools menu, or the brief icon on any row of your Pursuits list. It assembles from the same reads the contract page and Gap Analysis already use, so it can't disagree with them. The Export Brief button is visibly disabled rather than hidden — there's no export behind it today, and we'd rather you see that than hunt for it.

Because we only put a company in the primary list when SAM holds an explicit small-business self-certification under that contract's own NAICS code — the government's own on-file claim. Everything else drops to "Not eligible to prime under this set-aside — potential subcontracting partners," badged with the actual reason: Certified not small means SAM has a real negative on file, while No SB representation on record means there's simply no claim under that code either way. That second badge is an absence, not an assertion about the company's size, and it's a known limitation — some NAICS codes carry a size-standard exception in SAM that flattens the underlying yes/no, so a genuinely small company can land there. We won't compute size from revenue: many size standards are employee-based, and size status is the most protest-litigated status in federal contracting. When nothing clears the bar we say so plainly rather than padding the list.

It runs the opposite direction from the way you'd normally search. Instead of you describing what you want and hunting for it, you pick a company and the tool fans that company's own demonstrated capabilities outward across everything currently open — posted SAM solicitations, active contracts whose period of performance is running out, and OTA/CSO calls published by consortiums — then shows you where that capability language actually lands. You can point it at any company, not just your own: your competitor's profile fanned outward is a map of what they're positioned for. The capabilities it matches from are the ones with demonstrated federal evidence behind them, ranked by the obligated dollars supporting each one, so this is a picture of what a company has actually done rather than what it says it does. It draws no conclusion about fit and doesn't tell you what to bid.

In the top nav, open Intelligence Tools and pick Capability → Opportunity Match. Search a company by name or UEI in the banner at the top and choose it from the list — the results load underneath immediately. A line in that banner tells you exactly what's being matched from, in the form "Matching against 40 of this company's 512 recorded capabilities — ranked by demonstrated obligated dollars behind each capability name," so you always know the depth of the query you just ran. Every filter is visible at once beneath it: Type (all three populations, or just posted, expiring, or OTA/CSO), Expires within, Due within, Venue, Agency or office, NAICS or PSC in one shape-detecting box, Set-aside, Contract size, a "Narrow these matches" keyword box, and Place of performance. A few of those only apply to one population — Contract size and Venue narrow expiring contracts only — and the tool says so in the filter's own hover rather than hiding it. Each result row links through to the solicitation, contract, or call it came from.

Each row carries a small ⓘ next to its matched capability chips, and hovering it tells you where the match was actually found. Requirement-matched is the strongest: the capability language appears inside the government's own published requirements for that solicitation, and the hover tells you how many of its requirements were hit. Posting text only means the match is in the title and description — with two different reasons kept apart, either because no scope document has been analyzed for it yet, or because we did read the requirements and the match genuinely isn't in them. Topic-title match is what every OTA/CSO call gets, because no separate requirements corpus exists for that population at all. The basis is deliberately quiet — no badge, no colored label, no legend — because it's context for a row you're already reading, not a verdict on it. It does influence the order: between two rows matching the same number of things, the one matched inside the government's own requirements ranks first.

There's no score by design — same posture as Gap Analysis. The big number on a row is a count, not a rating: on a requirement-matched row it's how many of that solicitation's own published requirements the company's capability language hits, shown as "N of M." Every other row shows a plain count of matched capability names with no denominator, because the only honest denominator there would be a fact about your query rather than about the opportunity. Rows are ordered closest-to-target outward, and nothing on the page claims a win probability or tells you what to pursue. Two limits worth knowing. The tool matches from the company's top capabilities by demonstrated dollars, not its entire profile — a 500-name profile matches nearly everything and stops meaning anything. And a capability that turns up almost everywhere in the corpus won't put a row on this list by itself; it still counts once the row qualifies on something more specific, but a single generic word in a posting title isn't a match worth showing you.

OTA / CSO in the top nav covers Other Transaction agreements — a non-FAR acquisition instrument used heavily for prototypes and research, usually run through a consortium — and the Commercial Solutions Openings that often feed them. It opens Consortia, a list of consortium management organizations ranked by lifetime dollar flow, each with its own page: who buys through it, obligated dollars by fiscal year, the mix of agreement types, industry cost-share, its member roster, its recent awards, and where we have one, its founding charter quoted from the federal record. Below the list sits the open-CSO table. An individual OT award has its own page now — click its number from a consortium or company page — because OT agreements never flowed into the ordinary contract data and a contract page could never resolve one. Company profiles carry a matching Other Transactions (OT) band when a company has OT activity. OT dollars are never added into a company's FAR contract totals anywhere on the platform — different instrument, different reporting rules — and the band says so on its face.

Click OTA / CSO in the top nav. The page is titled Consortia; search the box labeled "Search consortium, brand, manager — or a company name to find which consortia publish it…" — it matches a consortium's public brand, its federal manager-of-record name and UEI, and the member companies published on its own site. Click a row for the full page. A consortium's public brand and the UEI the government files against are often two different names; curated rows resolve the brand, and anything we haven't curated renders honestly as a "Management Organization" rather than being given a name we made up.

They answer two different questions and we deliberately never merge them. Federally-Attributed Performers are companies carrying a consortium-member UEI on a real federal award under that manager — there's an actual award behind the name, so those rows carry awards, obligated dollars and a most-recent fiscal year. Self-Published Roster Members is the full list the consortium publishes on its own site; that tier carries no numeric column at all, on purpose, so a name there can never be read next to a dollar figure. Where a roster member also has a profile here, its chip links to it in blue; where it doesn't but the consortium published the company's own website, the chip is gold and opens that site in a new tab — so you can tell at a glance which chips leave the platform. The governing rule is printed on the page: roster membership is an access and eligibility fact, never a performance claim. The header stat ("N of M resolve to a registered company") is a name-match count, not an award count.

It counts what actually happened to prototype agreements that carry a real government reference to the same OT vehicle — four separate outcomes (Converted, Displaced, Not Yet under 24 months, No Production Identified), never blended into one score. A Converted: 0 is a statement about linkage, not a claim that the consortium never produces anything — which is exactly why a separate raw Production tile sits beside those four, showing production-type volume with no linkage claim attached. Standalone prototype awards with no vehicle linkage are counted out loud as outside what this can assess. If a consortium has no production activity at all, the tile isn't rendered rather than showing a zero.

No — and neither can anyone else from public data. OT agreements are exempt from the federal subaward reporting requirement, so there is no subcontractor tier published anywhere for them. Separately, OT reporting itself is limited by regulation to DoD, DHS, HHS (Office of the Secretary/ASMB), NIH and DOI, so agencies outside that list won't appear at all. Both facts are stated on the OT band itself. Read an absent subcontractor list as a structural limit of the source, never as evidence that a company worked alone.

New in beta. It's a composite hourly rate for that specific contract: total dollars invoiced divided by the direct labor hours the contractor reported under FAR 52.204-14. Two cautions we print on the band itself. "Dollars invoiced" is the whole invoiced value — it can include materials, travel and other direct costs, so it is not a clean labor rate; and on a Firm-Fixed-Price contract, invoicing doesn't have to track hours worked in the same period, so read that case as directional only. The FTE line divides by 1,920 hours a year (net of PTO and 11 federal holidays) because that's the billable view a capture team plans against — the divisor is an assumption, and the band says so. It shows what was reported; it is not a forecast of next year's rate and not a prediction of what any bidder would offer.

Open the contract profile and find the Labor Rate band, then click Labor rate intelligence for this contract →. That opens Labor Rate Intelligence, which charts the composite rate by fiscal year with the year-over-year change, marks the fiscal years that carry contract modifications, and lets you swap the 1,920-hour FTE divisor for your own number. There is deliberately no menu entry for this tool — it only exists in the context of a contract, and the link only appears when that contract actually has reported hours. A contract with a single reported year still opens, and says plainly that year-over-year escalation appears once more years are on file.

On a company profile, the Prime Contracts table has a Rates column at the right. A Labor rate chip in that column means labor-hour data is on file for that contract under the Service Contract Inventory; click the column header to sort the chips to the top and you have your shortlist. Open the contract itself to see the actual composite rate — the chip is presence only, deliberately no dollars. The same column is on the Task Orders table of a tracked-vehicle awardee report, covering the fifty highest-value orders shown there. A blank cell means nothing was filed for that contract, not that no labor was performed: coverage is partial, and DoD only reports above a $3M threshold.

Two record-level tables near the bottom of a company profile, under the summary figures. Prime Contracts is every prime contract that company holds: contract number, status, title, the organization and both offices, NAICS and PSC, the contract ceiling, and then three columns about flow-down — $ Subbed, % Subbed and # Subs — so a 0% row is a genuine self-performer rather than a blank. Subcontracts is the mirror image: work the company performed as a sub under someone else's prime. Every column sorts; a long title clamps to two lines with a control to expand it in place rather than being cut off. Both tables read the government's own award records, so the same coverage caveats apply as everywhere else — subaward rows only exist where the prime actually filed them.

It means the contracting office published a justification for limiting competition that names this contract — a J&A. The band shows the FAR authority cited, a plain-English gloss of what that paragraph covers, the date it was posted, the office, and the government's own sentence describing the grounds, quoted verbatim. There's a link to the posting itself. Read it for what it is: by the time a J&A posts, the decision not to compete has already been made and is usually signed. We report that the document was published and reproduce the government's own words — we don't characterize the action, don't tell you what it means for you, and don't assert an end date the document didn't state. A contract with no confirmed justification shows no band at all rather than an empty one, and a possible match awaiting human review is never shown in any form — not greyed, not hedged. To search the whole corpus rather than wait for one to surface on a contract you're already watching, click J&A in the top nav.

Click J&A in the top nav. It's its own pill rather than a row inside Intelligence Tools, because it's a corpus you browse rather than a tool you run — the table is already populated when the page opens, with no search required. Above the filters there's a keyword box covering titles, solicitation numbers, and the government's own stated grounds. Below it every filter is visible at once, nothing behind a "More filters" button: Type (FAR authority), a chained Department then Sub-agency pair, a Posted-between date range, and a Contract link toggle that narrows to just the ones we could tie to a contract we hold. Each row shows when it posted, the authority cited, the title and solicitation number, the office, and what the document names — with the contract and the incumbent linked through to their own records where the document names them.

A Justification & Approval is the contracting office's own published document stating why it limited competition. It is not only a decision to sole-source: the same instrument covers ceiling increases, extensions, and fair-opportunity exceptions on an IDIQ. Think of it as a findings brief and decision background — the office writing down, on the record, what it decided and the grounds it relied on. That's genuinely useful and usually hard to find, because unless one happens to surface on a contract you're already tracking there's no good way to go looking. Read it for what it is, though: a J&A is a published document, not an outcome. We show that it was posted, quote the government's stated grounds verbatim, and name the contract and incumbent where the document names them. We don't tell you the contract was extended, that a recompete is off, or what any of it means for your pursuit — the document records a decision the office had already made, and drawing the next conclusion is your call.

Because the two surfaces answer different questions, and the bar for putting a claim on a contract record is deliberately higher. Everything we've collected is listed in the database, including documents that name no contract at all. A justification only appears as a band on a contract page when the number it cites resolves to exactly one federal contract record — or when a person has reviewed the match and confirmed it. Anything ambiguous waits for that review and renders nowhere in the meantime: not on the contract, not greyed out, not hedged. Contract numbers aren't unique across agencies, so a number matching several records needs a human rather than a guess. The reasoning is one-directional on purpose — a wrong "this was sole-sourced" on a contract page is worse than a missing one. The row's own "What it names" column tells you which case you're in, including when a document was read in full and simply names nothing we can resolve.

Narrow, and we publish the numbers on the page rather than leave you to find out. A justification reaches roughly 6% of the federal services contracts that matter in a given year — it gets published when an office decides not to compete something, which is the minority of actions. About a third of justifications name the affected contract in a form we can resolve; the rest describe the action without identifying it, and those are still listed here, we simply can't link them. Around one in five documents can't be read at all, because redaction on this channel is done by printing and re-scanning, which destroys the text layer — and that's disproportionately the more sensitive ones. "We couldn't read it" and "it names nothing" are shown as different answers, never blurred into one. Treat this as a high-confidence feed of what we could confirm, not a complete record of sole-source activity: an empty result is a real answer about your filters, not proof the government did nothing.

There are three different reasons and the page tells you which one applies. Some documents are held pending a markings review — they carry controlled-information or distribution markings, so we don't hand them out until a person has looked; that is a statement about what the document appears to carry, not a ruling that it is controlled, and those files remain available on SAM.gov. Some are held for analysis only, meaning we're not licensed to redistribute that particular copy even though we can read it. And where there's nothing at all, the page distinguishes two facts it will not blur: SAM's own filing says no attachments were posted, versus SAM lists attachments we haven't retrieved yet. Documents we can serve come straight from our own storage, which matters because SAM's public copy typically rolls off after about 12 months and ours doesn't.

It's a dated feed of things the government did, newest first, in the government's own identifiers — a new award, an option exercised, a justification posted, a vehicle roster changing. Each line names its subject even on that subject's own page, so a row can be pasted into an email and still make sense. It only records changes in the federal record: nothing we do to our own data — refreshing, regenerating, re-reading a document — ever appears there. It's a narrative record, not a total: don't add the lines up and treat the result as a count of anything.

Hover the label and the tip says it, but here it is in full: it's the share of a company's active contracts whose period of performance ends within the next 12 months, taken from the federal award dates. Over 40% reads High, 20–40% Medium, under 20% Low. It's a measure of how much of the current book comes up for re-competition soon — not a prediction about any single contract, and not a judgment about whether the company will hold what it has. A company with no active contracts on record shows no Recompete Risk cell at all rather than a zero.

It means we hold no small-business self-certification for that company under the size question — nothing more. It is deliberately *not* a claim that the company is other than small: plenty of genuinely small firms simply have no such claim on file with us, and size status is the most protest-litigated status in federal contracting, so we won't infer one. The filter's own caption on screen says the same thing. If you're testing set-aside eligibility for a specific pursuit, the small-business set-aside entry above describes the stricter, NAICS-specific test we apply there.

On Contracts, click Place of performance in the filter row. The panel gives you regional presets (National Capital Region, Gulf Coast, Pacific Northwest, Southwest, New England), duty-station hubs (Huntsville, San Antonio, Hampton Roads, Colorado Springs, Dayton), the full state and territory list, a city search once you've picked a state, and a ZIP box that takes either a full ZIP or a prefix like 787xx. Opportunities carries the same control on its expiring rows, at state level. On the vehicle awardee searches the equivalent filter sits under Location in the filter drawer — note the grain difference there: that one is the company's own listed address on that vehicle's contractor listing, not where any particular work is performed. On Contracts, a row with a blank place of performance means the government's filing didn't state one — a gap in the record, not a claim the work happens nowhere.

Click Contracts in the top nav. In the filter row above the results there are two chained dropdowns: pick a department first (it opens on "Any department", with the Department of Defense at the top, the other departments A–Z, and everything else after), then the sub-agency dropdown unlocks and lists only that department's sub-agencies. Changing the department clears the sub-agency, so a stale sub-agency can never keep filtering underneath a new one. The same pair, in the same order, is on Customers and on Other IDIQs — one vocabulary across all three.

Open the company's profile and click Export Profile in the identity header, next to the Watch star. You get a Word document: the KPI band, who they serve, obligations by fiscal year and by recent quarter, the full capability footprint grouped by domain, vehicles, customers, subcontract relationships, and officers of record. Two things worth knowing before you paste from it. The capability section is the *whole* list, not the page's top slice. And the Executive summary is the same AI-assisted analysis (Claude, by Anthropic) that appears on the profile, carrying an asterisked line stating when it was generated — verify anything from it against the source before it goes into a proposal. If a document can't be built, you'll see the reason inline next to the button rather than a downloaded file.

On the Leaderboard, each row has an Export link in its own column at the right; the Find my company search box also offers Export ranking on any ranked result. Either gives you a one-page PDF fact sheet for that company's division rank. Read what it is before you send it anywhere: it's written in the third person and issued by Intelligent Win — it states the ranking recorded in a specific monthly bake, says on its face that bakes are frozen and not revised, and says explicitly that it is not a statement by, or an endorsement of, the company named. That wording is deliberate, so a company can cite it and a competitor can't misuse it. It carries the unfiltered division rank only.

Run the search or set the filters you want, then click Export results above the result list. A small chooser opens: type how many rows you want (1–500) and confirm — you get those rows off the top of whatever sort you're currently looking at, as an Excel file. It's on nine surfaces: Contracts, Opportunities, Companies search and browse, the vehicle awardee search and browse, Customers, the Leaderboard, Other IDIQs, OTA / CSO, and the teaming-candidate list inside Gap Analysis. Sheet 1 is a clean table starting at row 1 with typed columns, so sorting, filtering and pivoting work with no cleanup; on most ranked searches the alignment score and its component columns come across too. A Capability-mode search — on Companies or any tracked vehicle — no longer shows that score on screen, so its export carries the matched-award counts and dollars the list is actually ranked by instead, split into separate primary and secondary columns whenever you searched with a secondary term. Sheet 2, "About this export", records the exact search and filters you had applied, how many rows you took out of how many matched, the data vintage where the surface carries one, and when it was generated.

Three different reasons. First, you have to be looking at a *result set*, not the whole database: a bare unfiltered browse isn't exportable, so the button stays disabled with a tooltip telling you to add a search term or a filter. Second, 500 rows is a hard ceiling per export, enforced on the server regardless of what's asked for — take the top 500 of a tighter search rather than trying to pull everything. Third, there's an allowance of 25 exports per person each day, resetting at 00:00 UTC; hit it and you'll get a message saying so rather than a silent failure. That allowance is shared: a capability matrix pulled off an opportunity draws on the same pool as a result list, though it has no row chooser and no search requirement, because it exports one solicitation's requirements in full. Every refusal renders as text next to the button, never as a downloaded file that turns out to be an error.

Open the opportunity and scroll to the requirements card. In the strip above the requirement groups — the one carrying the counts and the Source line — click Export capability matrix (.xlsx). Sheet 1 is one row per extracted requirement in the government's own words, grouped by capability area, with the mandatory shall/must ones flagged and any named systems, standards, and clearances or certifications broken out into their own columns. The last three columns — Our Coverage, Evidence / Past Performance, Gap / Team Owner — are blank and tinted on purpose: they are your team's working space and the platform never fills them in. Sheet 2 records the solicitation, the issuing office, which scope document the requirements were read from, when they were extracted, and the data vintage. It's the complete current requirement set, not the slice shown on the page.

Because the control only appears once we've actually read a scope document for that solicitation and pulled requirements out of it. No PWS, SOW, SOO or Section C on file means there is nothing to export, and rather than hand you an empty workbook we don't show the button. That's a coverage limit, not a judgment about the solicitation — the requirements card in the same place tells you the same thing. If the page does show requirements and the export refuses, the reason renders as text next to the button rather than as a downloaded file; the usual one is the daily export allowance. One difference worth knowing if you're reconciling the file against the screen: when a solicitation is amended and we re-read the new document, the export carries only the current version's requirements, while the card on the page can still list a superseded amendment's rows alongside the current ones.

It's a monthly summary of what moved on the contracts you track and the companies you watch — end dates, options exercised, incumbent changes, obligations and ceilings, new awards, Leaderboard moves, disclosed leadership and SAM registration changes, justifications for limiting competition that name a contract you track, and newly posted topics under a Commercial Solutions Opening you're pursuing. Click the gold What changed chip in the top-right. It reads as two side-by-side panels — Contracts you track and Companies you watch — and a panel with nothing to report says so plainly rather than disappearing. It's tied to the monthly federal data refresh, not to a live feed, and it only reports moves above published floors — money changes at or above $250,000 or 5%, new awards at or above $250,000, and Leaderboard moves of 10 places or more. Those numbers are printed at the bottom of every digest, so a quiet month is readable rather than ambiguous. Email is optional and off by default: Account → Notifications → "Email me the monthly digest", with per-section toggles beneath it. One email per monthly refresh at most, and none at all if nothing changed.

A Commercial Solutions Opening is a standing announcement an agency keeps open — instead of one solicitation for one requirement, it publishes topic areas and takes proposals against them as they're released, usually toward an Other Transaction agreement. Because they behave more like a vehicle than a solicitation, we track them alongside OTA rather than in a separate database. Three places: posted rows on Opportunities carry a CSO badge, and the Type row of buttons — always open on the page, no drawer to click through — has a CSO button that narrows to just those; the notice's own page carries a Commercial Solutions Opening band; and OTA / CSO in the top nav has an Open Commercial Solutions Openings table you can sort and filter by agency or "Has open topics".

The band names who issues it, how many topics are on file (active and withdrawn counted separately), when it was last revised, when it closes — or states plainly that there's no closing date on file and it takes responses on a rolling basis — and, where we can join it honestly, the issuing department's own OT award activity. Below that is the topic list: number, title, summary, and a due date where the source document states one, soonest first. Withdrawn topics stay on the page, greyed and struck through, rather than disappearing.

Three limits, all of which the page states itself. Topic extraction can miss one — when it does, the page names the specific topic numbers it couldn't read rather than quietly showing a shorter list. SAM's OT award report carries no solicitation identifier, so an OT award cannot be tied back to the CSO or the topic that produced it, and we don't imply that link anywhere. And PURSUE tracks the whole opening, not an individual topic.

From the consortium's own public opportunities page — announcements it published itself, captured as headline information only. The block is labeled "Published by the consortium" for exactly that reason: it is not a federal posting, and the page keeps the two provenances separately labeled rather than blending them. They also appear on Opportunities under the OTA button, carrying their own OTA/CSO call chip so they can never be mistaken for a federal solicitation or an awarded contract — the founder's reasoning being that if you find one you like, membership is usually a signup and sometimes a fee, not a competition. Each row links out to the specific announcement where the consortium published a direct link to one, and to the opportunities page it was captured from otherwise. A task call whose deadline the consortium didn't publicly state renders as a stated absence, never a guessed date. The full solicitation package for these is typically members-only, and we don't retrieve it. Closed calls stay visible, greyed, rather than disappearing.

Because that subsidiary's UEI belongs to a corporate family we hold under a single parent record, and the federal figures we show are rolled up to that family. Rather than dead-end you on a UEI with no page of its own, we send you to the family's page. It's a real limitation, not a preference: a subsidiary with its own genuine award history doesn't yet get its own separate page, so you're seeing the family's combined record. If a company you know operates independently is being absorbed into a parent this way and that's wrong for your purposes, tell us via Feedback with both names — family structure is something we set deliberately, company by company, and we do change it.

Put it in quotes. A quoted phrase is matched as written, as one phrase — "aviation logistics" finds that phrase, not aviation-anything plus logistics-anything — and capitalisation never matters. Curly quotes work too: if you are on a Mac or an iPhone, the keyboard silently swaps your straight quotes for curly ones as you type, and until early September 2026 that quietly turned an exact-phrase search into a broad one without telling you. It does not any more, in any search box on the platform. Unquoted words are treated as a set of things you want all of, so quoting is the tool for holding a phrase together, and one quoted phrase counts as a single term no matter how many words are inside it. If you forget a closing quote, nothing breaks — the rest is read as ordinary words.

A recipe is a search you write as one line in the search-everything box — the blue magnifying glass in the top-right, ⌘K on a Mac, Ctrl-K anywhere else, or the box on your dashboard. Start it with Primary: and the work you're looking for, and the platform routes it into the Companies capability search instead of treating it as ordinary words. Add Secondary: for a second capability you want tracked separately, and you can finish with filters. So the whole thing reads like this: Primary: Aviation Logistics, Secondary: Sensors, IDIQ: OASIS+. Type it, press Enter, and on the results page the Company Capabilities card offers "Primary/secondary search — open the full tool →" — click it and the capability search opens with the Primary capability box, the Secondary box and every filter already filled in, and the search already run. Primary on its own is a perfectly good recipe; Secondary and the filters are optional.

Three kinds of filter are understood, and each one lands as an ordinary, removable filter chip you could have set by hand. IDIQ: or Vehicle: followed by a tracked vehicle — OASIS+, GSA MAS, VETS 2, STARS III or Polaris — sets the Vehicles held filter, exactly as if you'd opened the filter drawer and picked "Holds OASIS+" yourself. Size and certification words work on their own, with or without a label: SB, OTS, SDVOSB, WOSB, HUBZone, 8(a), SDB, VOSB, or the longer spellings Small Business and Veteran-Owned. Capitalisation and punctuation never matter, and you can stack several — Primary: Aviation Logistics, Secondary: Sensors, IDIQ: OASIS+, SDVOSB is one recipe. A vehicle name needs its IDIQ: or Vehicle: label anywhere in the middle of a recipe, because words like Polaris and MAS turn up in real capability descriptions and quietly turning one into a filter would drop companies for a reason you never asked for. The one exception is the very end of the line: Primary: Aviation Logistics, Secondary: Sensors, OASIS+ works, because a vehicle name sitting alone in the last position isn't ambiguous. Anywhere else, spell out the label.

If you name a filter we don't have, nothing is applied and the page tells you so — a short line above the results naming the exact word and stating that the results are not narrowed by it, with everything else in your search running as written. Two different things get two different sentences: a word we don't recognise at all, and a vehicle we do know that just isn't a filter option yet. There's also a shorter way in if you don't want the labels — two quoted phrases, like "Aviation Logistics" and "Sensors", route to the same place with the two boxes filled. Filters only work in the Primary:/Secondary: form, though, so put a recipe with an IDIQ: or a certification in it in the labeled shape. And write recipes in the search-everything box: typed into the capability box on the Companies page itself, Primary: is just words to search for.

Two numbers, in that order: how many of a company's federal awards actually matched what you searched for, and — only to break a tie — how many dollars sit behind those matched awards. Both are on the card, on the matched-award line beneath the company name, reading something like "24 aviation logistics awards · $312.0M," with an ⓘ that says the same thing. So the list is ordered by the two figures you can see, and you can check the order yourself.

What counts is narrower than it first sounds, deliberately. The count is awards, not evidence records — a contract that matched on two of your words is still one award, counted once — and it is rolled up across a corporate family, so a subsidiary's work counts toward the parent. Only demonstrated evidence counts: capability language a company inherited from a contract vehicle it holds a seat on is excluded, because every other holder of that vehicle could make the identical claim. And the dollars are the dollars on the matched awards only, never the company's total federal revenue — a large company doesn't rise on this list for being large. Nothing here is a prediction, a fit judgment, or a view on whether you should call anyone; it is a count of what the federal record shows, ordered.

If you add a Secondary capability, the order splits into two labelled groups rather than blending — Both first, then Primary only — and inside each group the same two numbers order the rows. A company that only demonstrates the primary is never dropped from the list, just banded below.

One thing this doesn't cover: the Domain tab on a vehicle search is a different kind of search, and it carries a match score of its own.

Search boxes wait for you to stop typing — about four-tenths of a second — before they go and fetch, so the list doesn't thrash on every keystroke. They also need at least three characters before firing: one or two letters match almost everything and cost you a slow, useless result. Clearing the box back to empty is not subject to that floor; that's the "show me everything again" action and it takes effect right away. If a search is genuinely working you'll see it say so with a running count of seconds, and past about ten seconds it will say it's a large search rather than leaving you guessing. Company and capability searches got substantially faster in late August 2026 — if one is still slow enough to bother you, that's worth a Feedback report with the exact search you ran.