How to Use Acquint
Acquint is a federal contracting intelligence platform for capture teams, BD professionals, and program managers. This guide explains what each tool does and when to reach for it.
Vendor 360
What it is: A complete profile of any federal contractor by UEI — contract history, sub-award relationships, protest record, FCA settlements, FMS notifications, political surface, and subsidiary cascade.
Before any bid kickoff. Understand the incumbent. Know who's in the room.
How to get there: Search for any company name, then click their name — the workspace loads.
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Data pulls from FPDS-NG via USAspending.gov FPDS Award Data Archive. Parent-UEI rollup uses the entity_lineage table derived from SAM.gov hierarchy. Coverage: FY2017–FY2025. Protest history from published GAO decisions; FCA from DoJ OPA press releases for resolved cases only.
FMS notifications sourced from DSCA published Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) announcements. Political surface (FEC defense-PAC contributions, LDA lobbying disclosures) is a 6-year trailing window; not all registrants disclose client-level spend breakdowns.
Competitor Intelligence (The Capability Match)
What it is: A ranked list of vendors who have prior awards in a given NAICS/PSC/agency lane. Shows who you'll be competing against on your next pursuit.
Capture planning. Know who to team with and who to beat.
How to get there: Available on the demo page as the “competitive set” view.
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Rankings are computed from FPDS prime award counts and ceiling values over the trailing 5 fiscal years, filtered to the specified NAICS 6-digit code, PSC code, and contracting agency. Ties are broken by recency of last award.
Sub-award-only performers are not surfaced here — only entities with at least one prime award in the lane. NAICS code changes at the award level (agencies sometimes miscategorize) are not corrected; treat rankings as a starting point for further investigation.
Recompete Pressure
What it is: Active IDVs filtered by agency, PSC code, and ceiling band, sorted by recompete score — a composite of ceiling utilization, time to PoP-end, and award size. Shows which contracts incumbents must defend in the next 18 months.
Opportunity identification. The recompete list shows you where the doors are opening.
Note: The recompete score is a heuristic based on public contract data — it surfaces candidates for investigation, not predictions.
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Score is composite: ceiling utilization × (1 − months_remaining/24) × award_size_band. Filtered to DARPA/AFRL/ONR × AC*/AR*/R408 PSC codes × $1M–$100M ceiling. Not a prediction — surfaces candidates for investigation.
PoP-end dates are taken from the current_end_date field in FPDS; multi-year options are not individually modeled. Contracts with zero reported obligations are excluded. Ceiling utilization above 1.0 (over-ceiling mods) is capped at 1.0 for scoring purposes.
Program Element (PE) Intelligence
What it is: Drill into any DoD RDT&E program element — funding trajectory (FY17–FY26), budget justification narrative, named programs, and congressional markup language from HASC/SASC.
Understanding where the money is and whether it's growing or shrinking. Before writing a technical approach, know the program's budget history.
How to get there: Click any PE code in the workspace or upstream signals view.
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Funding figures from DoD Comptroller R-2A program justification exhibits (PDF), parsed and normalized to then-year dollars. Congressional markup deltas sourced from HASC and SASC markup documents where machine-readable versions are available; coverage is partial prior to FY2020.
FY26 figures are President's Budget request, not enacted. Enacted figures for FY17–FY25 reflect appropriations law as signed; reprogramming actions are not reflected. PE narratives are extracted via OCR and may contain parsing artifacts on scanned exhibits.
Upstream Signals (Before the RFP)
What it is: DARPA, AFRL, and ONR anticipated solicitations — ingested directly from agency forecast pages. These are programs telegraphing what's coming 6–18 months before a Sources Sought posts.
Strategic positioning. By the time something hits SAM.gov, the program has already been shaped. These signals are the layer above.
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Forecast data scraped from published agency forecast-of-contract-opportunities pages (DARPA, AFRL, ONR). Refresh cadence is weekly; some agencies update their forecasts infrequently, so stale entries are flagged when last-modified date is older than 90 days.
Anticipated solicitation dates are agency estimates only — they slip routinely. Do not treat them as hard deadlines. Where a forecast entry links to a BAA or presolicitation on SAM.gov, that link is surfaced alongside the forecast record.
Corpus Search (Budget Document Intelligence)
What it is: Semantic search over 16,000+ embedded pages of DARPA R-2A program justifications and DoD J-Book budget exhibits. Ask in plain language; get reranked results with PE codes and page citations.
Research. “What does the FY26 budget say about formal verification?” — answered in seconds with source citations.
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16,000+ pages of DARPA R-2A program justifications + DoD J-Book exhibits embedded with BGE-large-en-v1.5, stored in Cloudflare Vectorize. Llama 3.3 70B on Workers AI reranks top-50 semantic hits to top-3 results. Coverage spans FY2020–FY2026 PB; earlier exhibits are partially indexed.
Results are ranked by semantic relevance to the query, not keyword frequency. Citation page numbers refer to pages within the source PDF as published by DoD Comptroller — they may not match PDF viewer page numbers due to cover pages and front matter.
Proposal Timeline Builder
What it is: Enter a solicitation close date and get a backwards-planned capture schedule — from pre-capture research through final submission. Contract type (FFP/Cost-Plus/T&M) adjusts the review cadence.
Capture coordination. Paste into the kickoff deck.
URL: /tools/timeline
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Milestone schedule is generated client-side from the close date you enter. Business days are calculated excluding U.S. federal holidays; the holiday list is hardcoded for the current and following calendar year and may require updates after each new year.
Review cadences differ by contract type: Cost-Plus adds extra days for accounting system and estimating system review touchpoints; T&M adds a labor-mix review milestone. All timelines assume a single-submission scenario — IDIQ task order schedules with multiple rounds are not modeled.
Pursuit Pipeline
What it is: A persistent tracker for active pursuits — one card per opportunity with go/no-go toggle, notes, days-to-close urgency, and a direct link to the timeline builder pre-filled with that pursuit's close date.
BD pipeline management. See everything in flight in one view.
URL: /tools/pursuits
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Pipeline data is stored in browser localStorage — no account or server-side persistence is required. Data does not sync across devices or browsers. Clearing site data will delete your pipeline.
Days-to-close urgency thresholds: red below 14 days, amber 14–30 days, green above 30 days. The Go/No-Go toggle is advisory only and has no downstream effect on other Acquint surfaces.
RFP Watchlist
What it is: Set a profile — NAICS codes, PSC codes, agency names, keywords — and the platform matches new SAM.gov solicitations against it. When something matches, you're alerted before your competitors open their inbox.
Opportunity capture automation. Set it once, don't miss a match.
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SAM.gov solicitation data is ingested via the SAM.gov Opportunities API, polled on a daily cadence. Match logic applies AND across NAICS/PSC/agency filters, OR across keywords. Keyword matching runs against solicitation title and description fields; attached document content is not searched.
Alert delivery and watchlist persistence require an account. Solicitations are matched against the profile active at time of ingest — retroactive matching against historical solicitations is not performed when a new profile is saved.
Capture Brief
What it is: A PDF generated on demand for any vendor — identity, FY trend, sub-agencies, PSC mix, protest history, FCA flags, and a sources footer. Two pages. Drop it into the kickoff deck.
Day-one competitive read. Generated in seconds for any UEI.
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Brief is generated server-side from the same data backing the Vendor 360 workspace — FPDS prime awards, USAspending sub-awards, GAO protest decisions, DoJ FCA press releases. All figures use the same FY2017–FY2025 trailing window as the workspace.
The sources footer lists publisher URLs for each data element, not individual award records. Brief layout is fixed at two pages; vendors with very large award counts show aggregated PSC and sub-agency breakdowns rather than line-item lists. Generated PDFs are not cached — each download reflects current data.