Awards

Awards are contracts that the federal government has already awarded to a company. The procurement cycle for these contracts is complete. Award data is sourced from USAspending.gov. The Awards module lets you search contracts that have already been awarded. It gives you tools for exploring contract ideas, researching companies, organizing your research, tracking expiring contracts, and analyzing award trends. Use the Awards module to:

Research which companies are winning contracts in your industry
Identify contracts approaching expiration for re-compete opportunities
Analyze award distribution by agency, NAICS code, set-aside type, and fiscal year
Build competitive intelligence on specific organizations
Ask questions of the award database in plain English instead of researching manually

Awards vs. Opportunities vs. Forecasts: Awards are completed procurements. Opportunities are active solicitations currently posted on SAM.gov. Forecasts are planned future procurements not yet solicited. The typical lifecycle is: Forecast → Opportunity → Award. The same requirement can appear in all three modules at different points in its life.

How to get there: Sidebar → Click Awards

The Awards workspace

When you open Awards, the main Kontratar sidebar is replaced by the Awards rail. Everything on this page is reached from that rail.

Rail item	What it opens
New Market Research Analysis	A new AI Chat conversation.
Search chats	Your previous conversations.
Projects	Workspaces for organizing related searches.
Expiring Contracts	Contracts approaching their expiration date.
Research	Questions that run automatically on a schedule.
Favorite Contracts	Awards you have bookmarked.
Analytics	Award totals and trends for a fiscal year.
Entities	Companies and organizations that hold federal contracts.

Your most recent conversations also appear under Recents at the bottom of the rail.

1. Browsing and filtering awards

Click Awards in the sidebar. The awards table loads with all indexed awarded contracts.
Use the filter controls at the top of the table to narrow results.

Filter	Description
Agency	The government agency that issued the award.
NAICS Code	The industry classification of the awarded contract.
Date range	Filter by award date, start date, or expiration date.

The table updates immediately after selecting filters.

Filter by expiration date rather than award date when you are looking for work you can bid on. The award date tells you when a competitor won. The expiration date tells you when the contract comes back up for competition.

2. Viewing award details

Click any award from the awards list, your search results, the analytics tables, or your favorites to open its detail page.

Field	What it shows
Award ID	The unique identifier for the award.
Agency	The awarding agency.
NAICS Code	The industry classification.
Dates	Award date, start date, and end date.
Value	The contract value.
Recipient	The contractor that won the award.
Set-Aside	Small business set-aside information, if any.
Place of Performance	Where the work is carried out.
Description	The contract description and scope.

The fields on this page are linked. Click the recipient to open that company’s entity profile. Click the agency to see its other awards. Following those links is faster than running a fresh search every time you want to widen the picture.

3. AI Chat

AI Chat lets you ask questions instead of researching manually through the awards list. You can ask the AI to search for awards won by a specific company, and you can attach documents to support your question.

Awards AI Chat showing a new conversation with an empty prompt box, an Attach button, and a character counter — A new conversation. Type your question in the box and click the arrow to send.

To ask a question:

Click New Market Research Analysis in the Awards rail.
Type your question in plain English.
To include a supporting document, click Attach and choose the file.
Click the arrow button to send.

While the AI searches, you can watch it work. When it finishes, it returns the awards it found. Questions that work well:

Show me all awards for Adept Engineering Solutions
Give me the highest valued award
What awards were given to a named company?
Find awards in NAICS code 541511 over $1 million
Which companies have won the most cybersecurity contracts?
Show me the contract history between the Department of the Army and a named company

AI Chat result showing a Reasoned section, a table of award records, and a summary paragraph below — The answer comes back as a table, with a written summary underneath explaining what the records cover.

The answer has three parts:

Reasoned. A closed section at the top. Open it to see how the AI understood your question before it searched. If an answer looks wrong, check here first.
The table. The awards it found. Scroll sideways for columns that run past the edge. Copy and download buttons sit above the top right of the table.
The summary. A short paragraph saying what the records cover, including the exact date range the AI used.

Under the answer are buttons to copy it, play it as audio, share it, or run it again. You can also ask follow up questions to refine your search, and click any award in the results to open its full details.

Check the date range in the summary. If you ask for something like “the last two years”, the AI works out the actual dates and states them in the summary. If it chose a different window from the one you meant, just say so in your next message. The conversation remembers what you were discussing, so you do not need to start over.

Continuing a previous conversation

Click Search chats in the Awards rail to see your earlier conversations. The most recent ones also appear under Recents. Click any conversation to continue it, instead of starting a new chat every time. You can attach supporting documents to a conversation you have reopened, the same way you would in a new one.

4. Projects

Projects help you organize related searches. A project holds a set of instructions and supporting files, and every chat you create inside that project uses them as context.

Projects page showing an empty state with a folder icon, the message No projects found, and a New Project button — The Projects page before you have created anything.

Creating a project

Click Projects in the Awards rail.
Click New Project. The button in the top right and the one in the middle of the page do the same thing.
Type a Project Name.
Type a Description if you want one. This is optional.
Click Create Project.

Create a New Project form with Project Name and Description fields, and Create Project and Cancel buttons — The Create a New Project form. Only the name is required.

Your project appears as a card showing its name and when it was last updated.

Projects page showing a project card with a name and a last updated timestamp — A project card.

Adding instructions and files

Once the project exists, open it to set it up. Instructions tell the project how the research should keep going. Write them as plain sentences, for example Only focus on Department of Agriculture awards. Supporting files are documents you upload to help the search make sense. Kontratar accepts:

PDF documents
CSV files
Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xls)
Word documents (.doc, .docx)

What instructions do. If your instruction is Only focus on Department of Agriculture and you then ask What are the awards available today?, you get Department of Agriculture awards back. You did not mention the agency in your question. The project applied the instruction for you.Instructions and files work together. A project scoped to one agency and loaded with your capability statement will filter to that agency and weigh the results against what your company actually does.

Using a project

Open the project and start a new chat inside it. Ask your questions as normal. Every chat in that project shares the same instructions and files, so you never have to restate the background.

Editing and deleting a project

Click the menu on a project card.

Project card showing a menu with Edit project and Delete project options — The project card menu.

Option	What it does
Edit project	Change the name, description, instructions, or files.
Delete project	Remove the project.

5. Expiring contracts

This is one of the most useful features for organizations looking for future opportunities. As contracts approach their expiration dates, they often become candidates for re-competes. This page gives you a quick overview of upcoming contract expiration dates so you can prepare before the work comes back to market.

Expiring Contracts Dashboard with summary cards, a filter panel, and a monthly calendar — The Expiring Contracts Dashboard. Filters on the left, calendar on the right.

Three cards sit across the top:

Card	What it counts
BPA Contracts	Active Blanket Purchase Agreements in the current results.
Delivery Orders	Active delivery orders in the current results.
Expiring this Week	Contracts reaching their expiration date in the next seven days.

Filtering

You can filter by agency, NAICS code, expiration date, or award type.

Agency filter open showing a search box and an alphabetical list of federal agencies — The Agency filter has a search box, so you can type instead of scrolling the whole list.

Filter	How it works
Personalized awards only	A checkbox limiting results to awards matched to your organization.
Agency	A searchable list of federal agencies.
NAICS Code	Opens a window listing the NAICS codes your tenant subscribes to.
Expiring Date	A From and To date pair, each with a calendar picker.
Award Type	Checkboxes for BPA, BPA CALL, DCA, DEFINITIVE CONTRACT, DELIVERY ORDER, DO, PO, and PURCHASE ORDER.
Type of Set Aside	Checkboxes for 8(A), BUY INDIAN, EDWOSB, HBCU, HUBZONE, INDIAN ECONOMIC, SMALL BUSINESS, DVOSB, and VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS.

Tenant NAICS Codes window with a search field, a list of subscribed codes, and Cancel and Done buttons — The NAICS Code window lists the codes your tenant subscribes to.

The NAICS filter only shows codes your tenant subscribes to. If a code you expect is not in the list, it has not been subscribed yet. That is a Settings change rather than a problem with the filter.

Filter panel showing a NAICS chip, From and To date fields, and Award Type checkboxes — Filters you have chosen appear as chips at the top of the panel. Each has an x to remove it.

When you have set your filters, click Apply Filters at the bottom of the panel. Click Clear Filters to start again.

Filter panel scrolled to the set-aside checkboxes, above the Clear Filters and Apply Filters buttons — Clear Filters and Apply Filters sit at the bottom of the panel.

Nothing changes until you click Apply Filters. This panel holds your choices until you apply them. If your filters seem to have no effect, this is usually why.

Selecting a date

The calendar on the right shows one month at a time, with month and year dropdowns above it. Coloured dots on a date show which award types expire that day. The legend under the calendar tells you which colour is which. Click any date to see the contracts expiring that day. They load into the panel below the calendar, headed with the full date and a count. Click any contract in that list to open its full details and identify whether it is worth pursuing as a re-compete.

Monitor expiring contracts in your target agencies and NAICS codes on a regular schedule rather than now and then. A contract you find twelve months out is something you can prepare for. The same contract found six weeks out is a bid the incumbent will probably win.

6. Research

Research lets you automate recurring AI queries instead of asking the same question over and over. You might ask something like Where are the latest cloud computing contract awards? and then schedule it to run automatically on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

Research page with a search box and a table showing Name, Prompt, Interval and Date columns — The Research page lists your scheduled questions with their interval and date.

This page is where you manage your schedules, review your research prompts, and view results.

Scheduling a research query

Write the question in AI Chat and check that it returns what you expect.
Click Schedule Research.
Choose how often it should run: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly.
Give it a name you will recognize later, for example Cybersecurity Award Details.
Click Save.

You schedule research from the chat, not from the Research page. The Research page is for managing what you have already set up. To create a new one, ask the question in AI Chat first.

Managing a scheduled query

Click any item in the list to work with it.

Action	What it does
Edit	Change the question, the name, or how often it runs.
View results	Open the results of that research.
Send results to email	Email the results to yourself.
Export	Download the results as a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or a CSV file.
Delete	Remove the scheduled research if you no longer want it.

Viewing research results

Clicking View results takes you to the results for that particular research. Results are organized by the date each run happened, so you can open one research item and read several runs in sequence. Comparing runs is how you spot a trend: what appeared, what dropped off, and what changed value between one date and the next.

Match how often a question runs to how quickly the answer actually changes. Running a slow moving question daily fills your list with runs that all say the same thing, which makes real changes harder to spot.

7. Favorite contracts

When you come across an award you want to revisit later, bookmark it here. To save an award, click the favourite button on any award in the awards list or in your search results. It is saved straight away.

Favorite Contracts page showing four summary cards above a searchable table of saved contracts — The Favorite Contracts page. A summary across the top, and your saved contracts below.

The cards across the top summarize everything you have saved:

Card	What it counts
Saved Contracts	Everything you have bookmarked.
Active Contracts	Saved contracts that are still running.
Within 30 days	Saved contracts expiring soon.
Blanket Purchase Agreements	Saved contracts that are BPAs.

Below the summary you can search through your saved contracts. You can search by award ID, contract type, NAICS code, agency, or expiration date. Click any contract to view its details, including its history. Remove a contract from your favorites when you no longer need it.

Treat the Within 30 days card as an alert rather than a number. If a contract you saved months ago has appeared there, your window to prepare a re-compete bid is nearly closed.

8. Analytics

Analytics shows award trends across the whole federal market for one fiscal year at a time.

Analytics Dashboard showing Total Awards, Total Value, Recipients and Agencies cards above three chart panels — The Analytics Dashboard. Change the fiscal year using the dropdown in the top right.

Four cards summarize the year:

Card	What it counts
Total Awards	Awards recorded for the selected fiscal year.
Total Value	The total amount obligated across those awards.
Recipients	How many separate companies received awards.
Agencies	How many government agencies issued them.

Below the cards, five panels break the data down.

Analytics Dashboard scrolled to show the Top Recipients list and the Top Awards table — Top Recipients and the Top Awards table, further down the page.

Panel	What it shows
Top Agencies	Agencies ranked by how much they obligated, with award counts. Click one to drill down.
Top NAICS Codes	A chart splitting awards across industry classifications.
Set-Aside Distribution	A chart splitting awards by set-aside category, such as Small Business, 8(a), HUBZone, and No Set-Aside.
Top Recipients	Companies ranked by value received, with award counts. Click one to drill down.
Top Awards	The highest value contracts, with agency, recipient, and amount.

Top Agencies and Top Recipients each have a search button, so you can jump straight to one instead of scrolling. Everything on this page is clickable. Click an award in the Top Awards table to open its details. Click a recipient to open that company’s profile and award history. Use the fiscal year selector to compare one year against another.

Look at the same NAICS code across two or three fiscal years before deciding a market is worth entering. One year tells you who is winning. Several years tell you whether the spending is growing, flat, or moving into fewer hands.

9. Entities

The Entities page lets you search for companies and organizations that have received federal contracts.

Entity Search page with a search field, Filters and Export buttons, and a results table — Entity Search. Search by legal business name, UEI SAM, or CAGE code.

Searching for entities

You can search using the company’s business name, its CAGE code, its primary NAICS, and other details. The results table shows:

Column	What it shows
UEI SAM	The Unique Entity Identifier from SAM.
Legal Business Name	The registered name. Any trading name appears underneath as DBA.
CAGE Code	The Commercial and Government Entity code.
Primary NAICS	The company’s main industry classification.
Actions	View opens the full profile.

Filters narrows the results further. Export downloads them.

Viewing an entity profile

Click the legal business name to open that organization’s profile, where you can explore its award history, its contracting activity, and the agencies it has worked with.

Section	What it shows
Total Awards	How many awards this company has received.
Total Value	The combined value of those awards.
Recent Awards	Its most recent contract awards.
Award History	Award activity over time, shown as a chart.
Top Agencies	Which agencies have awarded contracts to this company.

Every award listed on the profile is a link. Click one to open its full details, and from there click through to the agency. You can move from a company, to a contract, to an agency without running a new search.

Before approaching a teaming partner, open their profile and look at which agencies they have worked with. A partner who already has a relationship at your target agency is worth more to a bid than a bigger company with no history there.

Forecasts. Planned procurements agencies have announced but not yet solicited.
Pipeline Management. How to track a re-compete you found here through the 8-stage capture lifecycle.
Campaigns. How to send outreach emails to contracting officers about contracts you found in Expiring Contracts.

Parent topic: Kontratar v2.0 Documentation

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Market Intelligence

Business Development

The Awards workspace

1. Browsing and filtering awards

2. Viewing award details