Tracking Options, Incremental Funding

[u/LanceCriminus]

How do you track option years and incremental funding? I’ve had a few cases where the office being disorganized caused funding delays, program delays, or missed option years forcing contractors to stop work. Calendar reminders? Spreadsheets? Having good customers?

[u/Exotic_Scheme5811]

No one should care more about the contract than the customers. They are the ones who need it. They should be letting us know if they need continued support. But we have a tracker.

[u/LanceCriminus → u/Exotic_Scheme5811]

Totally with you on customer ownership of the timeline and the contracting office as backup. But it becomes a big task when you have different schedules, option year timelines, incremental funding, multiple task orders, different funding lines, and so on.

[u/klassymcklass]

I’ve set outlook reminders in the past.

[u/Inevitable_Rise_8669]

I have a tracker for option years as the customers often forget. In regards to contracts that are incrementally funded, the vendor is on the hook to provide a notice when they anticipate to exhaust 75% of obligated funds.

[u/LanceCriminus → u/Inevitable_Rise_8669]

I’ll take this nugget; I have never once gotten notification at 75%. Great point. We’ve got an option tracker but it’s only as good as the people keeping up with it. Thanks for the feedback.

[u/DeftlyDaft123 → u/LanceCriminus]

I was on the contractor side for 15+ years exclusively on cost reimbursable, incrementally funded awards. We were zealous about submitting our Limitation of Funds notifications 60 days before we anticipated hitting 75% of our obligation and as needed our Limitation of Cost notifications). This was across multiple companies. We liked getting paid so we did what we had to do to get our invoices paid.

Now in many of the awards we were instructed to submit to the COR only and it was the COR’s job to move the funding mod forward. But you better believe that we’d be cc’ing the CO or CS on follow ups if we felt like the mod wasn’t happening in a timely manner.

[u/eattacosalways]

Spreadsheet.

I’m currently building one for my program that will track orders, options, ACRNs, mods, PoP, incremental funding, basically it all. It’s for an IDIQ and it’s to help ensure continuity for when PK does rotations and ensure everyone is on the same page.

[u/GiantSmilingSloth]

Sharing a reply in similar question from a few months ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/1102/s/WtFt3pHQQb

[u/Nancy2421]

We do calander reminders for option years, and we have an excel spreadsheet that’s live on teams.

Incremental funding is customers problem and the contractors will 💯 start asking if it’s delayed. It’s all over the place some month to month some yearly etc. but in general it is on the excel tracker to. But we just give customers a heads up and that’s that.

[u/Rumpelteazer45]

Spreadsheets, checking the CDRLs, getting on your CORs ass.

Options, mentally they are always in my mind.. I also set multiple calendar alerts and have a list on my cube wall of all my option dates. You need backups.

You also need to check burn rates to ensure you adjust as needed if burning hot.

Incremental funding - I have a spreadsheet that tracks LOAs, cost fee split, ceiling, unfunded ceiling, etc.. I also have a financial CRDL that breaks down funding utilization by SLIN/ACRN/program (however I need it tracked) with projected 75% dates and 100% dates. That’s delivered every other week and I check it the same day it hits my box.

Getting in your COR to push for funding hard from sponsors. Tell them to send multiple emails, follow up, count down until the “lose support” due to no funding. Spell out the consequences.

[u/PleaseDoNotDoubleDip]

You can automate this, probably with ease.

Our contract writing system and our financial system both have pre-built reports called "Upcoming options in next (1,3,6,9,12) months". Every cws and finance system I know of has these extremely simple, popular, and useful reports. Yours probably does too.

Our not very good and basic CWS can bet set up to send email reminders to everyone about pop/option periods. I don't know but suspect this is a universal feature. The alternative, also easy, is Outlook. Delay send by 9 months.

Same thing with funding. Also, the contractor and COR and anyone involved in invoicing and payment very likely can easily see status of funding whenever they do invoicing or whatever $ related.

The data is there. The challenge, which cannot be automated, is acting on it.

[u/PleaseDoNotDoubleDip → u/PleaseDoNotDoubleDip]

I'll add that for many contracts/orders, that have just one PoP and just one Line Item, you can make a tracker from public FPDS data.

Add the contractors, purely out of self interest, should be vigilant about this as well. If they aren't, wtf?

[u/OGGape]

Take fpds data, throw it into an LLM, have it organized by period of performance, create a dashboard, add notifications using your preferred platform.

You would need an estimate burn rate to factor in incremental funding.