Federal Opportunities is where you research the federal market before you commit to a bid. You can see which agencies are spending more, browse open notices and past contract awards, and move a notice you want to pursue into your RFP list.
What Federal Opportunities is for
Open Federal Opportunities in the sidebar. It sits in the Pipeline group, just above Work Breakdown.
The page has six tabs:
- Budget Trends shows each agency's contract spending over three fiscal years, with a signal that says whether spending is growing, stable or falling.
- Contracts lists contract awards, with the recipient, agency, obligation, NAICS code, period of performance and set-aside.
- Opportunities lists contract notices from SAM.gov, with the response deadline and a Track as RFP link on each row.
- Programs lists federal programs. Select a card to open that program's page.
- Grant Forecasts lists upcoming grant opportunities from Grants.gov that have not been posted yet.
- Data Sources lists each data source with a Sync Now button.
Four tiles sit above the tabs, and selecting the Contracts or Active Opportunities tile opens its tab.
- Contracts counts the contract award records stored. Each modification of a contract is its own record, so this is not a count of distinct contracts.
- Total Obligations adds up the obligated dollars on the award records the page reads. It is a rough indicator, not a total of federal contract spending.
- Active Opportunities counts notices marked active whose response deadline has not passed.
- Watchlist counts the investments and programs you are watching.
A fifth tile, Programs, appears once any programs exist.
When no contract awards are stored yet, the Contracts tile reads "No contracts synced yet" instead of a zero. That means the data has not been loaded, not that no contracts exist. When nothing is on your watchlist, the Watchlist tile reads "Star an opportunity to watch it". Notices in the Opportunities tab have no watch control, though: you watch investments and programs, as Finding federal opportunities explains.
Where the data comes from
Propivix copies public federal data into its own database and shows you that copy. The sync code calls these public sources:
- SAM.gov for contract opportunity notices.
- USAspending.gov for contract awards. The Budget Trends tab reads agency spending from USAspending.gov when you open it and keeps the result for one hour.
- The Federal IT Dashboard for federal IT investments and planned budgets. The planned budget columns on Budget Trends come from here.
- Grants.gov for grant opportunities and grant forecasts.
- Inspector general (OIG) reports and OMB budget exhibits, which feed the program and investment pages.
The syncs run on a schedule, most of them once a day, and a few sources weekly or monthly. Between syncs, the source can change without Propivix knowing. A notice amended or cancelled on SAM.gov since the last sync still shows here as it was. Before you bid, open the notice on SAM.gov with the external link icon in the Link column and confirm the deadline and documents there.
Admins can also load data by hand:
- Select Sync Contracts or Sync Opportunities at the top of the page to pull the latest contract awards or notices.
- Select Import CSV to load contract data from a CSV, TSV or TXT file.
- On the Data Sources tab, select Sync Now next to one source.
Only users with the admin or super admin role can run Sync Contracts, Sync Opportunities and Import CSV. For anyone else, the page reports that the sync failed, or that the CSV import is for admins only.
On the Data Sources tab, "Not synced this session" means nobody has started a sync from this page since you opened it. It does not tell you when the scheduled sync last ran, and it does not mean the data is missing.
Run Auto-Linker, also on the Data Sources tab, links grants and contracts that are not yet tied to a federal program, by matching their UII and CFDA numbers.
Related guides
- Finding federal opportunities: Search and filter each Federal Opportunities tab, watch investments and programs, and search the government RFP feed.
- Tracking an opportunity as an RFP: Turn a SAM.gov notice from Federal Opportunities into an RFP, see which details carry over, and upload the solicitation for analysis.
- The recompete calendar: Find federal contract awards ending in the next 90 days to 18 months, filter by agency or NAICS code, and read the counts correctly.
- Award, vendor and program pages: What the federal award, vendor, investment and program pages show, and how to read the Market context block on award pages.
- The Contracts page: Record your organization's own contracts and their re-compete dates, and read the re-compete alerts and competitor summary.