Contracting 101

I've worked with several small businesses over the years that did exactly what they thought they were supposed to do when a new contract arrived. Someone reviewed the award, checked the funding, looked at the scope and dates, and made sure the important information made its way to the appropriate people. Sections H and I were reviewed too. But here's the problem: nobody ever raised a question about them. Not because there was never anything to question. In many cases, those s

Once you understand what your contract requires you to do, the next question seems pretty straightforward: When do you have to do it? For contracts using the Uniform Contract Format, Section F is Deliveries or Performance. This is where the contract specifies requirements for the time, place, and method of delivery or performance. At first glance, it can look like one of the easier sections of the contract. Find the period of performance, put the dates in your tracker, and mo

If Section B tells you what the Government is buying and how it's priced, Section C starts answering the next obvious question: What exactly did we agree to do? For contracts using the Uniform Contract Format, Section C is titled Description/Specifications/Statement of Work. Depending on how the contract was assembled, the detailed requirements may appear directly in Section C, or Section C may point you to a separate Statement of Work (SOW), Performance Work Statement (PWS),

In the first Contracting 101 article, we walked through how to read a government contract and what you should be looking for in each section. Now we're going to start digging into those sections individually, beginning with one that can tell you a tremendous amount about how an award is structured: Section B. Section B is generally where you'll find the supplies or services being purchased and the associated prices or costs, but that's about where the consistency ends. I've s

You just received a government contract. Congratulations! Now what? If you're new to government contracting, opening that first award can be overwhelming. There may be a cover form, pages of contract line items, a statement of work, special requirements, FAR or agency-specific clauses, and a collection of attachments that may or may not have arrived in the same file. The good news is that traditional federal contracts generally have a recognizable structure. Once you understa