Quick Start Guide

1Create your account

Choose Sign up free on the sign-in page (govcondash.ai/signin). The form opens with a plan chooser, and from the sign-in page it opens on the Pro card, so pick Free, the card on the left; Free is enough for this guide. Choosing Pro or Max instead sends you on to secure Stripe checkout once the account exists, with a 14-day free trial on Pro billed monthly.

The form then asks who you are. Government Contractor, the default, is for a firm that bids on and performs federal contracts; GovCon Professional is for a consulting, legal or accounting practice that advises them. Give your name, a business email address and a password of at least 12 characters mixing cases, a number and a special character.

Two checkboxes sit above the button: the weekly digest (opportunities, proposed rules, regulation changes and case law; off by default) and the required acceptance of the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Choose Create Account. There is no verification step to wait for: the account is live at once and the onboarding page opens.

2Link your company

The onboarding page opens with a short form. Start typing your legal name in the Company Name field, a pick-from-list control over the USAspending.gov recipient record: choosing your company from the dropdown fills in the UEI and DUNS and loads the profile behind them, and your small business status is then read from your SAM.gov registration rather than asked.

No match is expected for a company new to federal contracting or one that has only worked as a subcontractor. The dropdown says so and offers to use the name as typed; then pick a primary NAICS code by describing what you do (the picker searches the Census NAICS corpus at the six-digit level a SAM registration carries), state your small business status, and add your UEI whenever you have one. Fill in your contact details and choose Complete Setup: the platform fetches your active awards from USAspending.gov and builds the dashboard around them in a few seconds.

3Find your way around

The top bar greets you by name and, on every tab, carries the company strip directly beneath, so each page says whose data it shows: the company's logo, name, UEI, location and fiscal year end from your registration, its primary NAICS and PSC codes, a chip stating your SAM.gov registration (SAM Active, or Expires in 84d once it is inside ninety days), an NDC or Traditional chip from the nontraditional defense contractor check, and the chapters of Title 48 that apply to you. To its right sit the Usage meter (AI runs used in the current window against your plan's quota, one pool across every agent and workflow), the LLM badge naming the model in service, the Tour button and the zoom control.

The Dashboard page opens with Shortcuts in three groups, Win work, Stay compliant and Research and draft, each a one-click door into the tab that answers it (a door marked Pro leads to a paid surface). A contractor's rows follow: the Opportunities card, your five highest-scoring matched SAM.gov notices and the DoW SBIR/STTR topics your size record allows, each opening its full record in place; Book of Business, your active award value by agency divided by when it ends, beside Audit Readiness, your flexibly priced total, classification and cognizant DCAA branch; and the FAR Overhaul panel of class deviations in effect beside Case Law, the newest decisions across five forums ranked against your agencies, NAICS codes and contract types, with the reason each row scored printed beside it. A GovCon Professional's page leads with the Client Roster instead: each client's active awards, largest agency, next contract end, incurred cost due date, SAM.gov state and what needs attention within ninety days.

The sidebar holds five groups, Hub, Portfolio, Compliance, Research and Case Law, and lists the sub-tabs of the tab you are on beneath it. At the head of Hub, the Dashboard and Agent toggle switches the first page between the Dashboard and the Dashboard Agent, described after Step 4, and the browser remembers the one you chose; Hub itself holds Workflows, Workspace, Calendar and the AI Audit Trail. Each tab is one subject and its sub-tabs are the ways of reading it: the seven case law tabs share Browse, Insights and a Guide that explains what the corpus holds and how its rates are computed, so read the Guide before the numbers. Each tab's title row carries a Search button that opens the command palette.

Five habits that pay off on day one

• Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) opens the command palette. It jumps to any tab, starts any workflow, and from three characters searches ASBCA decisions and FAR clauses as you type, so most days you never need the sidebar.
• Ctrl+B collapses the sidebar to an icon rail and back, which is worth it on a laptop screen.
• The Tour button in the header walks you through the page you are on. On the Dashboard it tours the page; on a tab with sub-tabs it offers a tour of that section or of the whole dashboard.
• The zoom control at the right of the header. The dashboard opens at 85 percent, so a wide table or a long timeline fits one screen; the control offers 70, 85 and 100 percent, remembers your choice in that browser for a year, and applies on screens 1024 pixels and wider. It multiplies with the browser's own zoom, so keep the browser at 100. The figures in this guide were photographed at 100 percent, so at the default 85 the same panels are smaller and more of them fit one screen.
• The address after the # sign records exactly where you are, tab and sub-tab, so #gao-protest/insights or #ecfr-research/alerts can be bookmarked, pasted to a colleague, or typed straight into the address bar.

4Ask your first research question

Open Regulations & Policy in the Research group. Its FAR & DFARS sub-tab leads with the Regulations Agent, the one AI feature included with every plan, Free included. Type a regulatory question into the composer, or open the Prompt library and pick a starter such as Does CAS apply to my company?, then press Enter or the send button (Shift+Enter starts a new line). The agent expands your question with FAR and DFARS terminology, searches the platform's own copy of Title 48 (more than 10,000 sections), reads your company profile for context, and streams its progress before delivering a report with the applicable regulations, analysis and recommendations.

A sources rail lists exactly what it retrieved, so you can open each section and check the citation before relying on it. Use Export Word or Export Excel to keep the report, or on Pro and Max save it to your Workspace.

Getting a better answer

• Ask a specific question. What must a cost of money claim under CAS 414 show? gets a better report than cost of money. The library's prompts are the model to copy: first person, one situation, and the sections it turns on named.
• Add the Board's view. The options button beside the composer offers Include relevant ASBCA cases; turn it on when the question is dispute-shaped, such as an REA versus a claim or a termination settlement, and the report gains a section on the three most relevant ASBCA decisions.
• Spend the Free run well. On Free the agent runs once a week, so draft the question first. The full-text search card below the agent answers keyword lookups without spending a run, and the Proposed Rules panel under it lists Federal Register rules still open for comment, screened against your registration and award history.

Ask across the platform: the Dashboard Agent

Choose Agent in the toggle at the head of the sidebar, or open #overview/agent, and the Dashboard becomes the Dashboard Agent: one composer that searches the platform's regulations, DCAA guidance, case law and enforcement records at once. Scope chips above it narrow the search to Everything, Regulations, DCAA, Case law or My Company, your own company's contracts and matched notices. Starter cards offer a question to research a topic, check your status or find the section that holds something, and the Specialist agents row opens Agencies, Teaming, Opportunities, SEC Filings, Incurred Cost Proposal or Audit Readiness, handing your question to that tab's own agent where it has one.

Every question first runs a coverage scan, free on every plan: a tile for each collection in the chosen scope (seventeen across Everything), grouped by layer from the rule in force and what supersedes it to how DCAA audits it and how it has been decided, each with its matches and a door into the tab that holds them. On Pro and Max a cited research brief follows in a three-pane view and counts as one run against your plan's quota; on Free the scan is the answer and a notice offers the upgrade. HISTORY lists your past briefs to reopen.

Your first week: five things worth doing

Read your matched opportunities

Opportunities opens on Insights: a KPI band (Active matched, Strong matches, New this week, Closing in 7 days, Sources sought, Qualified share), a map of places of performance and the filters. Sources sought are the notices where the requirement is still being shaped and your input can still influence it. Browse lists the cards: each carries a match score, a deadline countdown and reason chips that say why it matched (your registered primary NAICS, an existing customer, an existing office), with View on SAM.gov for the official notice and Draft Requirements Package to hand it to a workflow. DoW SBIR/STTR adds the Department of War's research topics, which are never posted on SAM.gov.

Check your audit posture

Audit Readiness opens on Overview with your contractor classification, your flexibly priced contracts and the DCAA audit programs that apply to them; Selected Areas of Cost is DCAA's own guidebook, chapter by chapter, and the Audit Program Explorer opens each program's steps. Incurred Cost Proposal states the next due date, your SAM.gov fiscal year end plus six months, and lists the contracts a proposal must cover; it says Not available rather than guessing when the registration carries no year end.

Watch a regulation

From any Regulation Research result, add the section to My Regulation Watchlist, which records when each was last changed. The Alerts sub-tab reports exactly what changed across the acquisition regulations in the last seven days. Beside it, CAS holds the Cost Accounting Standards, FAR Overhaul the class deviations that currently displace parts of the FAR (opening on your largest awarding agency's, with a picker for any other department), FAR Cases the open rulemaking cases that will change it next, and Executive Orders every order signed since January 20, 2025, each searchable in full text.

Follow the case law

Seven corpora sit under Case Law: GAO Protests, ASBCA, CBCA, Court of Federal Claims, Federal Circuit, SBA OHA Appeals and the False Claims Act. Each has a Browse table, a reader that shows the decision verbatim, an Insights dashboard that states the denominator behind every rate, and a Guide. GAO and ASBCA add AI case analysis and a research agent, and Law Firms, the first row of the group, is a directory of the counsel those decisions name. Every decision in five of the forums also has a public page of its own (under /gao/decisions/, /asbca/decisions/, /cbca/decisions/, /cofc/decisions/ and /cafc/decisions/) that opens without an account, so a case can be sent to a client or opposing counsel as a link. The Case Law panel on the Dashboard page ranks the newest decisions against your own profile, and its Brief button drafts a brief on a decision in the workflow for that forum.

Run a workflow (Pro and Max)

Workflows is a gallery of twenty-one grounded workflows in five categories, from a GAO Protest Draft and the case briefs to a Cost Allowability Memo and the Opportunity Requirements Package. Each runs a fixed number of steps, cites only the sources it actually retrieved, and saves its document to your Workspace, where a row reopens the run it came from, exports to Word and Excel, and files to OneDrive. Every run is listed on the AI Audit Trail with its model and token usage.

Plans, limits and help

Every tab opens on the Free plan: the Regulations Agent runs once a week, Regulation Research search and the FAR Clause Library are fully open, and most other tabs are a preview, view-only or browse-only, marked Pro in the sidebar. Pro and Max unlock every AI surface with a monthly quota of runs that is one pool shared across all agents and workflows, so the figure you are shown is the figure that gates you. A run counts for thirty days (seven on Free) and then drops out on its own; nothing resets on a date. The Usage meter in the page header shows where you stand, and the same count sits beside the plan cards on the Setup page's Billing tab, where you change plan; paying yearly takes 20 percent off twelve monthly charges. Update your company, change your password or delete your account from the Account tab there.

Each forum's Guide sub-tab explains its corpus on one page, and every AI document carries its own sources rail.

Keyboard and address cheat sheet