Over the last year and a half I have been working with a research firm as their business development manager. It has been a wonderful opportunity to learn the world of Federal Contracting. Wow! Quite a world it is! One of my big discoveries is the level of financial disclosure the government makes through various websites. The king of research tools is FPDS.gov, and here’s why…
If a business has won a contract with the Federal Government, you can find all kinds of incredible information about the business right on FPDS. Even better, you can take this data and use it to find even more!
For example, a DUNS number is an important bar code-like identifier the government uses to track contracts per vendor. A DUNS is pretty similar to a social security number for a business. Once you know a company’s DUNS, you can filter the FPDS results to show ALL the contracts a single firm has won with the government!
With a little work in Excel, you can find out how much money the company has made with the government, which is an important part of that company’s annual revenues. This is incredible competitive intelligence that would be almost impossible to gather otherwise.
But like all good things, there’s a catch…
Frankly, using FPDS.gov can be a pain. You’ll need to be good with manipulating and filtering data in a search-engine like environment. Once you get the results, you have to open them in Excel. You’d better be good with Pivotables, otherwise it’s just about impossible to work with the data FPDS gives you.
More importantly, if you aren’t very comfortable with how FPDS is set up, you are likely not going to get all the data. This means you might end up with incomplete data and base critical strategic decisions with bad information.
FPDS uses a term call “Action Obligation” and it’s a dollar figure the government sets aside for a particular contract or task order. This is VERY useful, but not necessarily perfect data. You cannot assume that a contract Action Obligation is equal to the amount the government has or will pay a contractor. It’s usually very close, but a number of scenarios can mean that the vendor didn’t even get paid at all (default), lost employees and couldn’t charge the full amount, or even that the government cancelled the contract half way through.
FPDS is still an incredible source of competitive intelligence, though. Just be aware of the limitations and you’ll have a wealth of free information at your fingertips. Let me know if you need help!
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
