{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "kind": "job",
  "role": "president",
  "slug": "pipeline-digest",
  "title": "Pipeline and backlog digest",
  "status": "ready-today",
  "updated": "2026-09-03",
  "canonical": "https://aiagents.construction/roles/president/pipeline-digest/",
  "audience": "US general contractor, $5–10M revenue",
  "sections": {
    "job": "The president at a US general contractor doing about $5–10M a year — usually the same person who signs the bid, calls the surety agent, and decides whether to chase the next school addition or let it go. There is no business-development director, no preconstruction manager, and no CFO building a rolling forecast. The pipeline lives in a bid folder, an email thread with an architect, a signed contract nobody has started, and the owner's head.\n\nThis job is **use an agent**, not build a model. The desk already exists: an invitation-to-bid email, the bids you sent, the bid bonds your agent posted, signed contracts and the ones still \"verbally awarded,\" a job-cost or billing sheet in Excel, and a bank balance. The agent sits in the **read-the-pipeline-and-draft-one-page** step only. It does not decide what to bid. It does not tell you your bonding capacity. It does not call the surety.\n\n**This is not the [weekly project-risk digest](https://aiagents.construction/roles/president/risk-digest/).** That page is the backward-looking exceptions brief across **active** jobs: what moved this week, what's late, what nobody mentioned. This page never opens a daily. It looks at work that has **not been built yet** — bids out the door, awards waiting on a notice to proceed, and remaining contract value that has not been earned. One is \"how are my running jobs?\" The other is \"what am I running out of, and when?\"\n\nIt is also not the [WIP schedule](https://aiagents.construction/roles/controller/wip-reporting/). WIP is an accounting document — costs to date, estimate to complete, earned revenue, over/under billing — built monthly for a bank, a surety, or a CPA. Backlog runway is a **management** number: remaining contract value divided by how fast you burn it. The two share inputs and answer different questions. Do not let one page pretend to be the other.\n\n**What the one-pager is.** Four blocks, refreshed monthly (or the first Monday after a bid day), each one line per item, each line citing a document you actually have:\n\n- **Open bids** — bid submitted, no decision. Owner/architect, bid date, your number, alternates, whether a bid bond is out, and **when your exposure ends**.\n- **Awarded, not started** — you won it, and nothing is in the ground. Contract signed or not, notice to proceed received or not, the commencement basis, the completion date you agreed to, and what has to happen before day one.\n- **Backlog** — remaining contract value on work under contract, job by job, and the runway that adds up to in months.\n- **Cash-flow gaps ahead** — where money goes out before it comes in: mobilization on a new award, retainage you have not billed, a pay-app cycle that lands after payroll.\n\n**Backlog, defined by somebody other than you.** [ABC's Construction Backlog Indicator methodology](https://www.abc.org/Portals/1/ABC%20CBI_CCI%20Methodology%20June%202023.pdf) is the cleanest public statement of what the word means and how to convert it: backlog is \"the amount of work, measured in dollars, that construction companies are already contracted to perform but have not yet completed,\" and the published formula is **current month's level of backlog ÷ prior fiscal year revenues × 12 = total months of forward-looking work under contract**. ABC's own framing is the one that matters to a small GC: \"the smaller the value of backlog as a share of annual revenues, the less comfortable contractors are as they steadily work off that backlog,\" and backlog tends to decline in stress \"as contractors continue to deliver services yet enter into fewer new contracts.\" That is arithmetic a $5–10M shop can do in a spreadsheet cell. It is also arithmetic an agent can get wrong by feeding it the **contract sum** instead of the **remaining** value — the single most common error in this whole job.\n\n**The national number is not your number.** ABC's [most recent published reading as of this page's date](https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/abcs-construction-backlog-indicator-plummets-in-july) (Washington, Aug. 11, 2026): CBI fell to **8.0 months in July**, down 0.8 months from both a month and a year earlier, from a member survey conducted July 20 to Aug. 4. Every industry, region, and company size declined; the South was the only region with larger backlog than a year before. ABC chief economist Anirban Basu, in the same release: the 88% of ABC contractors not under contract on a data center averaged **7.5 months** of backlog versus **11.4 months** for the 12% that were, and backlog in the $30–$50 million annual-revenue category fell to its lowest level since March 2020. Useful context. **Not a benchmark you passed or failed.** CBI is a confidential survey of ABC member firms in nonresidential segments, disaggregated by size, region, and segment — a national average, published monthly, one month in arrears. Your four jobs are not a sample. Check [abc.org](https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/abcs-construction-backlog-indicator-plummets-in-july) for the current month rather than quoting this page's figure a year from now.\n\n**The number owners will actually ask you for.** When a public owner or a private client pre-qualifies you, the AIA form is [A305–2020, Contractor's Qualification Statement](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009307282-instructions-a305-2020-contractor-s-qualification-statement) — a sworn, notarized one-page document with five optional exhibits (A General Information, B Financial and Performance, C Project-Specific, D and E Past Project Experience); it must be used with at least one exhibit, and Exhibit A is the usual one. [Exhibit A](https://assets.aiacontracts.com/ctrzdweb02/zdpdfs/preview_a305exhibita_2020.pdf) asks, in order: **§ A.2.2** \"State your organization's total dollar value of work currently under contract\"; **§ A.2.3** \"Of the amount stated in Section A.2.2, state the dollar value of work that remains to be completed\"; **§ A.2.4** your average annual dollar value of construction work performed during the last five years. § A.2.3 *is* backlog. Exhibit C asks the same two questions (§ C.2.2, § C.2.3) scoped to the project office that would run the job. If your pipeline page cannot produce § A.2.3 on demand, you are going to guess it into a notarized document later. Note the denominator difference before you do division: ABC's months formula uses **prior fiscal year revenue**; A305 asks for a **five-year average**. They are not the same ratio. Pick one, label it, and use it consistently.\n\n**Open bids: when does the exposure end?** [A701–2018, Instructions to Bidders](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500010280261-summary-a701-2018-instructions-to-bidders), is the AIA form for competitively bid projects; it tells bidders how to get documents, how to ask for clarification or substitutions, how addenda arrive, how to submit — and covers bid security, modifying or withdrawing bids, and performance and payment bonds. Project-specific facts live in the Advertisement or Invitation to Bid or in Supplementary Provisions, so **your copy governs**, not a generic summary. Two official timing facts worth putting on the page:\n\n- **§ 4.4.3** lets a bidder who discovers a **clerical error** in its bid notify the Architect within **two days** after bid opening — or a timeframe set by the law of the jurisdiction where the Project is located — and, on providing evidence to the Architect's reasonable satisfaction, withdraw the bid, which is then not resubmitted. Two days is a very short line on a digest that only refreshes monthly.\n- **§ 6.2** (revised in 2018) gives the bidder under consideration for award a window of **14 days before expiration of the time for withdrawal of Bids** to ask, in writing, for reasonable evidence of the Owner's financial arrangements for the Project. The Owner then has **seven days** to furnish it, leaving seven days before that expiration. If the evidence does not come, the Bidder is not required to execute the Agreement.\n\nA701 § 4.2 also governs bid security and how long the Owner may retain it — the number of days after bid opening at which a bidder may withdraw and request its security back is a **fill point on the form**, so read the copy in your bid package instead of assuming a default.\n\n**A bid bond is a live commitment, not paperwork.** [A310–2010, Bid Bond](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009326941-summary-a310-2010-bid-bond), is a one-page form that establishes the maximum penal amount that may be due the Owner if the bidder fails to execute the contract and provide any required performance and payment bonds; it assures the Owner is paid the difference in cost to award to the next qualified bidder, up to that penal amount. The 2010 edition adds language allowing the Owner and Contractor to **extend the period of acceptance of the bid for up to 60 days without obtaining the surety's consent** (A310–2010 replaced A310–1970, which expired December 31, 2011; subcontractors may also use it where the contractor requires a bid bond). [The instructions](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009321301-instructions-a310-2010-bid-bond) cover parties, penal amount in words and figures, project identification, and signatures by both Contractor and Surety. Practical consequence for the digest: a bid you mentally wrote off six weeks ago may still be a bonded obligation, and an \"extend our bid\" email is a real decision with a 60-day edge in the form. Put the date on the page.\n\n**Public bid dates come from a public place.** For federal work, [SAM.gov Contract Opportunities](https://sam.gov/content/opportunities) is the official system: procurement notices from federal contracting offices, including pre-solicitation notices, solicitation notices, award notices, and sole source notices. Anyone may search without an account; an account lets you save searches, follow changes to an opportunity, and join interested-vendor lists, and there are downloadable data files and a public API. State, county, school-district, and municipal owners each run their own portal. **Do not ask a model to remember bid dates.** Paste the notice, or the invitation email, into the upload and make every date on the page trace to it.\n\n**Awarded, not started: the bucket that bites.** Under [A101–2017 § 3.1](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500010257962-summary-a101-2017-standard-form-of-agreement-between-owner-and-contractor-where-the-basis-of-payment-is-a-stipulated-sum), the date of commencement is a **checkbox**: the date of the Agreement, the date of a notice to proceed issued by the Owner, or a different date the parties agree (used when the Owner needs time to file mortgages or otherwise delay the start). § 3.3.1 is another checkbox — Substantial Completion by a specified calendar date, or within a set number of days from commencement — and § 3.3.2 allows tiered Substantial Completion dates for phases the Owner will occupy early; § 3.3.3 cross-references the liquidated-damages fill point. AIA's own write-up on the [notice to proceed](https://learn.aiacontracts.com/articles/notice-to-proceed-in-construction/) makes the consequence plain: Contract Time is measured from the date of commencement, and every downstream milestone, including Substantial Completion, runs from that date. So \"awarded, not started\" is not idle inventory. If your completion date is a **fixed calendar date**, every week the NTP slips is a week off your schedule and toward liquidated damages. If it is **days from commencement**, a slipped NTP moves the whole job into a different quarter's cash and a different crew. Those two contracts belong in different columns on the page.\n\n**Cash-flow gaps: the timing, not the total.** No AIA or federal form publishes \"the small GC cash forecast.\" What the public documents do fix is the **clock**, and the clock is the gap. On federal fixed-price construction, [FAR 52.232-5](https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.232-5) has the Government making progress payments **monthly** as the work proceeds (or more often if the Contracting Officer determines), on estimates of work accomplished and approved by the CO, with the request substantiated by an itemization, the amount included for each subcontractor, the total of each subcontract, and amounts previously paid to each sub — plus a signed certification. On **retainage**: if satisfactory progress has not been made, the CO \"may retain a maximum of 10 percent of the amount of the payment until satisfactory progress is achieved\"; when the work is substantially complete the CO may keep what is adequate for protection and shall release the rest. Bond premiums are reimbursable on request after evidence of full payment to the surety, and retainage does not apply to that portion. [FAR 52.232-27](https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.232-27) sets the payment clock: a proper progress-payment request is due **14 days** after the designated billing office receives it; released retainage is due as specified in the contract or **30 days** after CO approval for release; final payment is the later of the 30th day after a proper invoice or the 30th day after Government acceptance; an improper invoice must be returned within **7 days**; and the prime must include a clause obligating it to pay each subcontractor for satisfactory performance not later than **7 days** from receipt of payment. Private work and state or municipal work run on their own contract terms and their own prompt-pay statutes — **read your contract**, and do not let a model apply a federal clause to a private job or invent a state deadline. The digest's job is only to line up the dates you can prove: award, mobilization spend, first pay app, expected receipt, payroll and sub-payment obligations in between.\n\n**Why a $5–10M GC still does this by hand today.** [NASBP](https://www.nasbp.org/pipeline-newsletter/contractor-capacity-the-overlooked-c-in-surety-underwriting/) — Daniel Christianson of Old Republic Surety, writing in NASBP's Pipeline newsletter — describes surety underwriting's three Cs: capital, character, and **capacity**, \"the limit at which a contractor can perform jobs successfully,\" measured by people, equipment and resources, and subcontractor and supplier relationships. His framing: \"Capacity is about performance, not potential. It measures whether a contractor can handle their current projects and those they plan to pursue without overextending their resources,\" and capacity \"does not expand automatically as revenue grows.\" The early warning signs he lists are exactly what a pipeline page is looking for one quarter early: a rise in underbillings, heavier reliance on bank lines of credit, backlogs filled with unfamiliar project types, and behavioral cues of stress. He also names what a surety wants to see: \"Sharing financial statements, work-in-progress schedules, and **upcoming bid projections** gives sureties a clear understanding of a contractor's operational capacity.\" On this shop, that pipeline projection is one person's memory until somebody writes it down. And, as he puts it, \"A contractor's ability to say 'no' to the wrong job can be as important as their ability to secure the right one.\"\n\n**What this job is not.** It is not a bid/no-bid decision. It is not a bonding-capacity calculation — your surety sets that, not a model. It is not a WIP schedule, a financial statement, or an A305 you can sign. It is not the [risk digest](https://aiagents.construction/roles/president/risk-digest/). It is not a CRM, a plan room, or a dashboard subscription. It is one page that tells you how much work is really in front of you and what could fall off it this month.",
    "use": "This is a use workflow. You do not train a model. You do not ask it to remember bid dates, guess an award status, or forecast a market. You give it your pipeline roster and the underlying documents, you get a one-page draft, you check every date, and you own the read.\n\n1. **Write the pipeline roster first — three lists, not one.** Excel is fine.\n   - *Bids out:* project, owner/architect, bid date, your submitted number, alternates, bid bond posted (yes/no, penal amount), acceptance/withdrawal period per your copy of the Instructions to Bidders, status (awaiting award / shortlisted / no word).\n   - *Awarded, not started:* project, contract sum, signed or verbal, NTP received (date) or awaited, commencement basis per A101 § 3.1, Substantial Completion basis per § 3.3.1 (fixed date vs days), any tiered milestones, what is blocking start (permit, bonds, insurance, owner financing, buy-out).\n   - *Backlog:* job, revised contract sum, billed to date, **remaining contract value**, expected finish month.\n   If a job is not on the roster, it will not be on the page. The roster is the control, exactly as it is on the [risk digest](https://aiagents.construction/roles/president/risk-digest/).\n2. **Attach the documents behind each line.** The bid invitation or [SAM.gov](https://sam.gov/content/opportunities) notice (for the bid date), your submitted proposal, the bid bond, the award letter or email, the signed agreement's Article 3 page, the notice to proceed if it came, and the billing/job-cost export that supports remaining value. A screenshot of an email counts. A memory does not.\n3. **Give it your revenue denominator, explicitly.** For runway in months, state which number you are dividing by — prior fiscal year revenue (ABC's published formula) or a trailing average — and put it in the prompt as a fixed input. Do not let a model pick a denominator or estimate your revenue.\n4. **Ask for four blocks and nothing else.** Prompt shape: read the attached roster and documents and draft **one page** with four sections — open bids, awarded-not-started, backlog by job with total remaining value, and dated cash-flow gaps. Every line names the project from the roster and cites the attached document (email date, notice number, contract § reference, export row). Compute backlog runway as total remaining contract value ÷ the revenue figure I supplied × 12, and show the arithmetic. Flag any bid whose acceptance or withdrawal period ends within 30 days, any award with no NTP older than 30 days, and any month where scheduled outflows precede the pay-app receipt I described. **Leave a field blank and say \"not in the uploaded documents\" rather than estimating.** Do not invent a bid date, an award, a contract sum, a notice to proceed, or a payment date. Do not state my bonding capacity. Do not call a verbal award \"backlog.\"\n5. **Human edit — the dates are the job.** Open every cited document. Check each bid date against the invitation or the portal notice, not the draft. Check each award status against paper: signed agreement, or nothing. Check remaining value against your billing export, not against the contract sum. Re-do the runway division yourself; it is one cell. Strike any sentence that explains *why* an owner is delaying unless someone actually told you that.\n6. **Separate what you know from what you hope.** Weighted-pipeline math (\"40% chance × $2M\") is your judgment, not the model's. If you want it, apply your own percentage after the draft and label it as yours. A model assigning win probabilities to your bids is generating numbers, not reading files.\n7. **Own the runway read.** Sign and date the page. Backlog months is an input to a decision only a person makes: chase more work, hold margin, delay a hire, call the bank before you need it, or tell the surety agent early. NASBP's point stands — that conversation goes better when you bring the pipeline yourself.\n8. **Act the way you already do.** Call the architect on the bid with no word. Ask for the NTP in writing. Move the estimator onto the bid that lands next week. All from *you*. Do not forward a raw draft to your surety agent, your banker, or an owner, and do not paste unverified numbers into an A305 you are about to have notarized.\n\nExpected shape of the gain: less time reconstructing \"what's actually in front of us\" from four folders and an inbox before a bank or surety conversation. That is not \"the model runs sales.\" There is **no** published, independent hours-saved or accuracy number for a $5–10M GC pipeline digest that this page will invent. Time two of your own cycles — draft plus your edit versus building it cold — before you change anything you pay for.",
    "build": "A general-purpose model that reads PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets can assemble a four-block pipeline page from a roster plus the underlying documents, and can do the runway division if you hand it the denominator. Award status, bid/no-bid, capacity, and the meaning of a thin runway need a person.\n\n> A workable v1: a prompt template that returns exactly four tables — (1) bids out: project, bid date, amount, bond posted, exposure-ends date, source; (2) awarded-not-started: project, sum, signed?, NTP?, commencement basis, completion basis, blocker, source; (3) backlog: job, revised sum, billed, remaining, expected finish, source — plus a total and the runway arithmetic shown; (4) cash-flow gaps: month, outflow event, inflow event, days apart, source. Then a short \"expiring within 30 days\" list and a \"not in the uploaded documents\" list. Footer: draft, unreviewed, do not send. Keep the transcript with that month's folder.\n\nDo not build a custom pipeline classifier, do not fine-tune on your bid history, and do not stand up a warehouse. Your roster and this month's documents are the whole corpus. If you already keep bids or contracts in software you pay for, the agent drafts from an **export** of that; this page does not sell you a new system.",
    "deploy": "1. Pick a real month you already lived through — ideally one that included a bid you **lost**, an award whose NTP slipped, and a month where cash was tight.\n2. Rebuild the roster as of that date and attach the documents you had then. Run the agent. Time upload, draft, and your edit.\n3. Diff the draft against what actually happened. Record: bid dates it got wrong or invented, awards it treated as backlog before signature, remaining values it pulled from the contract sum instead of the billing export, expiring bid exposure it missed, cash gaps it smoothed over, and any confident number with no source.\n4. Decide with a rule set fixed in advance: no page leaves your laptop unreviewed; every date cites a document; a verbal award never counts as backlog; the runway denominator is the one you supplied. If it fabricates a bid date or a notice to proceed, it is not ready.\n\nUse your real pipeline, not a vendor demo. Keep the workflow only if the approved page is one you would base a hiring or bidding decision on.",
    "manage": "**What \"good\" looks like**\n\n- A named human — the owner — **reviews and signs every page** before any number reaches a bank, a surety agent, a bonding company, or a pre-qualification form.\n- Every line cites an attached document. Blank plus \"not in the uploaded documents\" beats a plausible date.\n- **Backlog is remaining value**, not contract sum, and never includes a verbal award, a letter of intent, or a bid you feel good about.\n- The runway denominator is stated on the page (ABC's published formula uses prior fiscal year revenue; A305 § A.2.4 asks for a five-year average — they are different ratios).\n- Bid exposure has an end date on the page: the withdrawal/acceptance period from your copy of the Instructions to Bidders, the bid bond, and any A310-style extension you agreed to.\n- Awarded-not-started rows show the **commencement basis** and whether Substantial Completion is a fixed date or a day count. A slipping NTP on a fixed-date job is escalated, not filed.\n- Cash-gap lines show two dates and the days between them, sourced from the contract's payment terms — not from a generic \"net 30.\"\n- National indicators (ABC's CBI) appear as **context**, clearly labeled as a survey average, never as your company's performance.\n- No raw model text goes to an owner, architect, lender, or surety. No unverified number goes into an A305 that a notary will stamp.\n\n**Who owns the seat**\n\nThe president/owner. On a $5–10M GC, the person reading the pipeline is the person who signs the bid, guarantees the line of credit, and decides who gets hired next spring. An estimator can confirm a bid date; a bookkeeper can confirm billed-to-date; neither owns the runway read. Your surety agent owns capacity, your CPA owns the statements, and an agent does not become \"I know where my company stands.\"\n\n**When to skip the agent**\n\n- You have one job and one bid out. Open two folders. A page is theater.\n- The documents do not exist — nothing was written down about the award, and the bid file is a memory. Fix the record first; a model cannot read what was never saved.\n- You are inside a **48-hour** decision on a clerical bid error or a withdrawal question. A701 § 4.4.3 runs in days, and jurisdictions vary. Call your attorney and your surety agent.\n- You are filling out an A305 or a bank package **right now**. Those get built from your books and signed by you, not drafted from a chat.\n- You need to know your bonding capacity. That is a surety underwriting decision. NASBP describes what underwriters weigh; they, not a model, set your limit.\n- You wanted a forecast. This job reads what exists. Win probability, market direction, and next year's revenue are your calls.\n\n**How to stand it up this quarter**\n\nUse the model you already have access to. Build the three-list roster once — it is the durable artifact, and it will outlive any tool. Attach this month's documents, ask for four blocks and the arithmetic shown, then check every date against its source and sign it. Repeat at the start of next month. Keep it only if the approved page changes what you do. Do not buy a pipeline, CRM, plan-room, or dashboard product to complete this job.\n\n## Citations\n\nTools are citations, not new brand pages. Do not invent vendor homepages. This page does not create a Procore, Autodesk, Sage, Foundation, Power BI, BuildingConnected, or other pipeline/dashboard vendor listing.\n\n- **[ABC Construction Backlog Indicator — methodology](https://www.abc.org/Portals/1/ABC%20CBI_CCI%20Methodology%20June%202023.pdf)** — official definition of backlog (\"already contracted to perform but have not yet completed\") and the public conversion: current month's backlog ÷ prior fiscal year revenues × 12 = months of forward-looking work under contract. Confidential monthly survey of ABC member firms in nonresidential segments, disaggregated by firm size, geography, and segment; the same survey produces the Construction Confidence Index (0–100 diffusion, above 50 = expected improvement).\n- **[ABC CBI — July 2026 release](https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/abcs-construction-backlog-indicator-plummets-in-july)** — Aug. 11, 2026: CBI fell to 8.0 months in July, down 0.8 from a month and a year earlier; survey conducted July 20–Aug. 4; every industry, region, and company size declined; ABC chief economist Anirban Basu on the data-center split (7.5 months for the 88% without data-center work, 11.4 for the 12% with it) and on the $30–$50M revenue category hitting its lowest level since March 2020. National context, not your runway. Check the current month before quoting it.\n- **[AIA A701–2018, Instructions to Bidders](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500010280261-summary-a701-2018-instructions-to-bidders)** — the competitive-bid procedure document, coordinated with A201–2017 (and usable with A232–2019); covers obtaining bidding documents, clarification and substitution requests, addenda, bid submission, bid security, modification/withdrawal, and performance and payment bonds. § 4.4.3: clerical-error withdrawal within two days after bid opening (or the jurisdiction's timeframe) on evidence to the Architect. § 6.2: 14 days before expiration of the time for withdrawal, the bidder under consideration may request evidence of the Owner's financial arrangements; the Owner has seven days; without it the Bidder need not execute the Agreement. Project-specific terms live in the Advertisement/Invitation to Bid or Supplementary Provisions — **your copy governs**, including the fill point for bid-security retention days.\n- **[AIA A310–2010, Bid Bond](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009326941-summary-a310-2010-bid-bond)** — one-page bond setting the maximum penal amount due the Owner if the bidder fails to execute the contract and furnish required performance and payment bonds; covers the Owner's cost difference in awarding to the next qualified bidder, up to that amount. The 2010 edition allows extending the bid acceptance period **up to 60 days without the surety's consent**; it replaced A310–1970 (expired Dec. 31, 2011) and may be used by subcontractors. [Instructions](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009321301-instructions-a310-2010-bid-bond): parties by full legal name, penal amount in words and figures, project identified sufficiently, signed by Contractor and Surety.\n- **[AIA A305–2020, Contractor's Qualification Statement](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009307282-instructions-a305-2020-contractor-s-qualification-statement)** — sworn, notarized statement plus five optional exhibits (A General Information, B Financial and Performance, C Project-Specific, D/E Past Projects); must be used with at least one exhibit. [Exhibit A](https://assets.aiacontracts.com/ctrzdweb02/zdpdfs/preview_a305exhibita_2020.pdf): § A.2.2 total dollar value of work currently under contract; **§ A.2.3 the portion of that which remains to be completed** (backlog); § A.2.4 five-year average annual construction volume. Exhibit C repeats § C.2.2 / § C.2.3 for the project office. This is where an unverified pipeline number becomes a notarized one.\n- **[AIA A101–2017](https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500010257962-summary-a101-2017-standard-form-of-agreement-between-owner-and-contractor-where-the-basis-of-payment-is-a-stipulated-sum)** — stipulated-sum owner–contractor agreement adopting A201–2017. § 3.1 date of commencement by checkbox (Agreement date, Owner's notice to proceed, or another agreed date); § 3.3.1 Substantial Completion by specified date or number of days from commencement; § 3.3.2 tiered Substantial Completion dates; § 3.3.3 liquidated-damages cross-reference; § 5.1.7 prescriptive retainage (amount, exclusions, reduction at Substantial Completion). Context: [notice to proceed and the start date](https://learn.aiacontracts.com/articles/notice-to-proceed-in-construction/) — Contract Time is measured from commencement, and every milestone runs from it.\n- **[NASBP — contractor capacity in surety underwriting](https://www.nasbp.org/pipeline-newsletter/contractor-capacity-the-overlooked-c-in-surety-underwriting/)** — Daniel Christianson, Old Republic Surety, in NASBP's Pipeline newsletter (Dec. 12, 2025). Capital, character, capacity; capacity as people, equipment/resources, and sub/supplier relationships; it does not expand automatically with revenue. Early warning signs: rising underbillings, heavier reliance on bank lines of credit, backlogs full of unfamiliar project types, behavioral cues. Sureties want financial statements, WIP schedules, and **upcoming bid projections**. An industry author's underwriting perspective, not a contract document.\n- **[FAR 52.232-5](https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.232-5)** and **[FAR 52.232-27](https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.232-27)** — federal fixed-price construction payment mechanics: monthly progress payments on CO-approved estimates with subcontractor substantiation and a signed certification; retainage of up to 10 percent when progress is unsatisfactory, released as progress is achieved and at substantial completion; bond-premium reimbursement; 14 days for a proper progress-payment request, 30 days for final payment, 7 days to return an improper invoice, and a 7-day pay-the-subcontractor flowdown. Applies to federal contracts containing these clauses. Private and state/local work runs on its own contract terms and prompt-pay statutes.\n- **[SAM.gov Contract Opportunities](https://sam.gov/content/opportunities)** — official federal procurement notices (pre-solicitation, solicitation, award, sole source), searchable without an account; accounts allow saved searches, following an opportunity, and interested-vendor lists; data files and a public API are available. State, county, and municipal owners publish on their own portals.\n- **Excel, email, PDF, the bid file you already keep** — roster, runway arithmetic, source documents. If bids or contracts already live in software you pay for, the agent reads an export of that. No new vendor page on this site.\n\n## Watch-outs\n\n- **A missed bid date is a lost job, quietly.** This is the failure mode of a model reading a stack of emails: it summarizes the ones it read and never mentions the invitation it did not see. A digest cannot flag a bid you never uploaded. The roster is the control; the portal or invitation email is the truth. Re-check every date on the page against its source before you plan a week around it.\n- **Misread award status.** \"We're going with you\" in a parking lot, a letter of intent, a low-bid tabulation, and an executed agreement are four different things, and a fluent model will flatten them into \"awarded.\" Only a signed contract belongs in backlog. Note the commencement basis (A101 § 3.1) and whether the NTP arrived; an award with no NTP and a fixed Substantial Completion date is a schedule problem accruing in silence.\n- **Contract sum is not backlog.** ABC's definition is work contracted but **not yet completed**. If the agent pulls the revised contract sum instead of the remaining value, your runway inflates by everything you have already built. Check the arithmetic in one cell; it is the cheapest audit on the page.\n- **The smoothed cash gap.** Models write reassuring prose. A page that says \"cash is manageable through Q4\" while a mobilization, a payroll, and a retainage hold all land before your first pay-app receipt is worse than no page. Make each gap two dates and a day count, sourced from the contract's payment terms — federal clocks (14/30/7 days) do not apply to your private job, and a state prompt-pay deadline is not something to accept from a chat window.\n- **Benchmark theater.** CBI is a national ABC-member survey average published monthly in arrears. \"We're below the national 8.0 months\" is not a diagnosis, and being above it is not safety. Your runway is your remaining value over your burn.\n- **Invented dates, numbers, and notices.** Same habit as legal-citation hallucination: Dahl, Magesh, Suzgun & Ho, *Large Legal Fictions*, 16 *J. Legal Analysis* 64 (2024) ([arXiv:2401.01301](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01301), [doi:10.1093/jla/laae003](https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laae003)) — public LLMs on verifiable federal-case questions hallucinated often and could not reliably tell when they had. Those percentages are **legal-case questions, not pipeline accuracy**; do not import them as a construction performance rate. Do import the habit: every date, dollar, and document reference is unverified until you open the file.\n- **Expiring exposure you forgot you had.** A bid bond is live until the acceptance period ends or the Owner releases the security. A701 § 4.2 governs retention and return; A310–2010 lets the acceptance period be extended up to 60 days without the surety's consent. \"We didn't get it\" is a feeling; the date is a fact in your copy of the documents.\n- **Pipeline math dressed as forecasting.** Win probabilities, market outlook, and next year's revenue are judgment. If a model produces them, it produced a number, not a reading. Apply your own weighting after the draft and label it yours.\n- **Unsigned AI to the surety, the bank, or a pre-qual form.** Fluent and wrong is worse than short and true — especially in an A305 that a notary will stamp, or in a package underwriters compare against your WIP and statements. NASBP's transparency point cuts both ways: share the pipeline, but share the one you checked.\n- **Do not replace the president.** An agent assembles a page from files. The owner still owns the read of backlog runway, the bid/no-bid call, the hiring decision, the conversation with the surety, and the company.\n\n## Verdict\n\n**Yes** — a $5–10M US GC should run this job this quarter if they have more than a couple of jobs plus bids in the air, the documents already exist (invitations, submitted bids, award letters, signed agreements, a billing export), the bottleneck is that nobody has assembled the forward picture since the last bank meeting, and a person will still check every date and sign the page. Use an agent to **read the open bids, the awarded-not-started work, and the remaining backlog and draft a one-page pipeline view** — runway in months, upcoming bid dates, commitments expiring soon, dated cash gaps — with the owner owning the runway read. Skip this quarter if you have one job and one bid; if the pipeline was never written down; if you are inside a 48-hour bid-withdrawal or bonding decision; if you expected win probabilities, a market forecast, or a bonding-capacity number; or if you were about to buy a CRM or dashboard for it. This page is a job listing, not a vendor listing."
  },
  "citations": [
    {
      "name": "ABC Construction Backlog Indicator — methodology",
      "fact": "Official definition of backlog and the public formula that converts backlog dollars into months of work",
      "url": "https://www.abc.org/Portals/1/ABC%20CBI_CCI%20Methodology%20June%202023.pdf",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "ABC Construction Backlog Indicator — July 2026 release",
      "fact": "Latest published national reading (8.0 months, July 2026) — an ABC member survey average, not your company's runway",
      "url": "https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/abcs-construction-backlog-indicator-plummets-in-july",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA A701–2018 Instructions to Bidders",
      "fact": "Competitive-bid procedure — bid security, modification/withdrawal, clerical-error window, § 6.2 pre-award financial-evidence clock",
      "url": "https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500010280261-summary-a701-2018-instructions-to-bidders",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA A310–2010 Bid Bond (summary)",
      "fact": "What a posted bid bond obligates; 2010 edition permits extending the bid acceptance period up to 60 days without surety consent",
      "url": "https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009326941-summary-a310-2010-bid-bond",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA A310–2010 Bid Bond (instructions)",
      "fact": "One-page form; parties, penal amount, project identification, signatures",
      "url": "https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009321301-instructions-a310-2010-bid-bond",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA A305–2020 Contractor's Qualification Statement (instructions)",
      "fact": "Sworn, notarized qualification statement plus five optional exhibits — the form owners use to ask for your work under contract",
      "url": "https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500009307282-instructions-a305-2020-contractor-s-qualification-statement",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA A305–2020 Exhibit A (official preview)",
      "fact": "§ A.2.2 total dollar value of work currently under contract; § A.2.3 value remaining to be completed; § A.2.4 five-year average annual volume",
      "url": "https://assets.aiacontracts.com/ctrzdweb02/zdpdfs/preview_a305exhibita_2020.pdf",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA A101–2017 (summary)",
      "fact": "§ 3.1 date of commencement (Agreement date / NTP / other); § 3.3.1 Substantial Completion by date or days; § 3.3.2 tiered milestones; § 5.1.7 retainage",
      "url": "https://help.aiacontracts.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500010257962-summary-a101-2017-standard-form-of-agreement-between-owner-and-contractor-where-the-basis-of-payment-is-a-stipulated-sum",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "AIA — Notice to Proceed and the A101 start date",
      "fact": "Contract Time is measured from the date of commencement; every downstream milestone runs from it",
      "url": "https://learn.aiacontracts.com/articles/notice-to-proceed-in-construction/",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "NASBP — contractor capacity in surety underwriting",
      "fact": "Capital / character / capacity; early warning signs; sureties want financial statements, WIP, and upcoming bid projections",
      "url": "https://www.nasbp.org/pipeline-newsletter/contractor-capacity-the-overlooked-c-in-surety-underwriting/",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "FAR 52.232-5 Payments under Fixed-Price Construction Contracts",
      "fact": "Monthly progress payments on approved estimates; retainage up to 10 percent when progress is unsatisfactory; release at substantial completion",
      "url": "https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.232-5",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "FAR 52.232-27 Prompt Payment for Construction Contracts",
      "fact": "14 days for a proper progress-payment request; 30 days for final; 7-day pay-the-sub flowdown — the federal cash clock",
      "url": "https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.232-27",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "SAM.gov Contract Opportunities",
      "fact": "Official federal procurement notices — pre-solicitation, solicitation, award, sole source; searchable without an account",
      "url": "https://sam.gov/content/opportunities",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    },
    {
      "name": "Excel",
      "fact": "Pipeline roster and backlog runway math (desk tool they already have)",
      "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/excel",
      "lastVerified": "2026-09-03"
    }
  ],
  "changelog": [
    {
      "date": "2026-09-03",
      "note": "Published from Scout job playbook."
    }
  ]
}