User guide

GovBidFlow finds federal contract opportunities, scores each one against your company, and helps you turn the good ones into a finished proposal.

Four things, every day:

1. It pulls new opportunities from SAM.gov.
2. It scores each one for fit and tells you why.
3. It keeps the ones you chase in one place, with their deadlines and tasks.
4. It drafts proposal sections using your own approved content.

It does not submit anything for you. You upload the finished proposal to SAM.gov or the agency’s portal yourself, and then mark it submitted here.

Stages 1 and 3 run on their own. Stages 2 and 4 wait for you, and nothing reaches a customer until you act.

You need three things. Without the first one you can sign in, but you cannot do much.

If you sign in and the screen looks empty, you are probably in a workspace that has not been set up yet. Say so rather than assuming it is broken.

Sign in at the login page. Use Google, or the email you were invited with. If you forgot a password, use Forgot password on that screen.

Then read the email. Every weekday at 8:20 in the morning, Eastern time, the platform emails you a digest. It is the only thing you have to read to stay on top of your pipeline.

• New opportunities that scored well for your company
• Pursuits with a deadline coming up
• Tasks that are due or already overdue
• Any contract worth recompeting

A second email arrives in the same few minutes about pipeline hygiene: pursuits that have gone stale or passed their deadline.

If no email arrives, it is almost always one of two things. Your company has the digest switched off, or your address is not on the recipient list. Both live under Settings, Team. Check there before reporting a fault.

Open the home page. It lists opportunities the platform found, with a fit score and the reasons behind it. Read the reasons, not just the number.

Every opportunity gets one of three decisions from you. Making a decision is the whole job at this stage. An opportunity nobody decides on just sits there.

Always give a real dismiss reason. The platform learns from them. If enough opportunities are dismissed as off-target, it can suggest keywords to filter out, so your list gets better. A lazy reason teaches it nothing.

One rule worth knowing: an opportunity can only have one live pursuit at a time. The database enforces it, so you cannot accidentally create two teams working the same bid.

Open Pursuits in the menu, then click the one you are working. Everything for that bid lives on its page. Work it in this order:

1. Read the solicitation. Upload the documents to the pursuit if they are not already there.
2. Let it shred the solicitation. The platform pulls out every requirement and builds a compliance matrix, so nothing in the RFP goes unanswered.
3. Check the matrix yourself. It is good, not perfect. A missed requirement is a lost bid.
4. Run the Writer. It drafts the sections from your approved library content.
5. Edit what it wrote. Treat the draft as a first pass by a junior colleague, never as finished work.

What the Writer will and will not do. It only uses library items marked verified. It will not invent past performance, staff, or numbers it does not have. So if a section comes back thin or vague, that is usually not a bug. It means the library is missing the content that section needs.

Need to ask the contracting officer something? The platform can draft the email for you, and it files their reply against this pursuit automatically. It never sends anything on its own. You read it and you send it.

1. Run the Reviewer. It checks the draft against the compliance matrix and the page limits, and tells you what is missing.
2. Fix what it found, then run it again if you changed a lot.
3. Check the submission card. It lists what the solicitation asks you to hand over, and warns you if the proposal runs over the page limit.
4. Submit it yourself. Upload to SAM.gov or the agency portal before the deadline. The platform cannot do this part.
5. Come back and mark it Submitted. This is the step everyone forgets.
6. Later, mark it Won or Lost when you hear.

Why the last two steps matter more than they look. Those statuses are how the platform knows what actually happened. Skip them and your pipeline shows work in progress that is really finished, the hygiene email nags you about a bid you already sent, and you lose the record of what you won. A win you recorded is also past performance you can reuse on the next bid.

This is the part that decides whether anything good gets written. The Writer can only use what is in your library and marked verified. An empty library means thin proposals, every time.

The library lives under Settings, Library. It holds five kinds of content:

Mark an item verified only when the facts in it are true and checkable. Verified means somebody stands behind it. The Writer treats verified content as safe to put in front of a government customer, so a wrong fact marked verified becomes a wrong fact in a submitted proposal.

Where to start if the library is empty: write up three past contracts, even small ones. Customer, what you did, when, how much, how it went. That single hour unblocks more than any other work in this platform.

Most settings you can ignore. These are the ones that change your day.

Two things worth knowing about recipients. A person on the email list does not need an account, and does not get one. They receive the email and nothing else. And the list is per company, not per person, so everyone on it gets every kind of notification. You cannot give one person only the digest.

About connecting a mailbox: the platform only reads. It never marks your mail as read, never moves it, and never sends from it without you pressing send.

What each pursuit status means

Set these honestly. The emails and the pipeline view are only as good as these are.

Which emails arrive when

All times are Eastern.

The digest sends once per company per day. If something triggers it twice, the second one is skipped on purpose, so you will never get two.

Check these before reporting a fault. Most of the time it is one of them.

Do not retry a failed Writer run over and over. If it failed twice, something is wrong that a third attempt will not fix, and each attempt costs money.

One trap worth naming. There is a test copy of this platform at a different address. It sends its own emails and its data is not real. If a figure in an email does not match what you see on screen, check you are on govbidflow.com and that the email did not come from a staging address. Staging mail is marked, but check anyway.