Upon award of your Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract, you’re likely to be greeted with many tasks and terms you’ll need to get familiar with quickly. Sales reporting, Minimum sales requirement, Order Level Materials Special Item Number (SIN), Mass Modification—these are all terms that might get thrown around by your Contract Specialist during the award process. But what do they actually mean for you? What action items need to get done following the award of a General Services Administration (GSA) MAS contract? As a proposal writer that manages the post award process on a regular basis, I’ll let you know the best way I’ve found to get started on managing your GSA MAS contract.
After a contract is awarded, you will get your contract number that can be found in your award documents or on your eLibrary page. Take that contract number and register it with the Vendor Support Center (VSC). Once you do, they’ll send you an email that will get you access to the Schedule Input Program, or SIP.
SIP is the program that you will upload your GSA pricelist to, as well as the products that will be displayed on GSA Advantage!, if applicable. You will need to download and install SIP; the installation page is on the VSC’s website.
I’ll tell you now, SIP is a legacy program and so is not as intuitive as the newer user interfaces we’re used to. There will be a learning curve, so give yourself plenty of time to familiarize yourself with SIP, as GSA mandates offerors upload their Pricelist and products within 30 days of contract award. If you would like to access additional information on SIP, check out a previous blog post with some tips and walkthroughs.
It’s important to note that SIP is slowly being phased out and replaced with the FAS Catalog Platform (FCP), so this may not apply to you in the future. But as of right now, new vendors need to go through SIP.
After award, there is action you’ll need to take in the Mass Modification portal. This is where you will accept or decline adding the Order Level Materials (OLM) SIN to your Schedule contract. The OLM SIN gives you additional flexibility in the use of your Schedule contract by allowing open market items to be sold under your GSA Schedule.
The conditions of utilizing the OLM SIN are:
(1) The items added must be considered necessary to the existing sale of GSA contract line items, AND
(2) The total value of goods or services sold as OLMs cannot exceed 33% of the total value of the sale. It’s important to note that should you not accept the OLM SIN at this point, there is no current way to add the OLM SIN to your contract down the road.
Depending on how long it’s been since your offer was awarded, there will likely also be one or more Solicitation Refreshes awaiting you in that mass mod portal. Every few months, GSA will make updates to the guidelines in the MAS Solicitation document, often minor, but sometime major. The last Solicitation Refresh to come out was Refresh #29, which altered economic price adjustment mechanisms, among some smaller changes.
When changes like this get pushed out by GSA, every vendor with a Schedule contract is obligated to accept the changes made. This is done through the mass modification portal. You are required to accept Solicitation Refreshes within 90 days of their release, so make sure you accept any that are pending when you accept the OLM SIN modification.
Sales reporting is something that all vendors must complete on a routine basis. Even if no sales have gone through your new contract yet, you still must abide by the reporting requirements and deadlines. For vendors under the Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) program, their reporting cadence is monthly. For vendors under the traditional Commercial Sales Practice (CSP), their reporting cadence is quarterly. For all vendors, the industrial funding fee must be remitted quarterly.
The sales reporting portal hosts not just sales reporting functions, but also is where you will remit your Industrial Funding Fee (IFF) payment. In the portal, you will input your sales by SIN (in the case of TDR, you will need to report by line item sold, and the portal provides an Excel template to streamline reporting this way). Once your sales have been reported, the portal calculates the IFF payment you owe the government, and you will be able to pay that within the portal.
If you are not currently under TDR, be aware that GSA is actively expanding this program. As of Solicitation Refresh #28, TDR has become mandatory for all product offerings. Based on the trends we’ve been seeing, upcoming refreshes may require your Schedule contract move to TDR reporting.
Once you upload your Pricelist to SIP and it gets accepted by GSA, you will get access to GSA eBuy and the Purchase Order (PO) Portal of GSA Advantage!. Access to these portals is usually the main thing vendors look forward to following a new Schedule award.
Once you get access, know that only the designated contract administrator will have access to eBuy and the PO portal. You can add users to your account manually, though, and we recommend you do this once you have access to these portals. Regularly checking eBuy for new opportunities, or the PO portal for incoming orders, will be vital to your success on GSA MAS, so make sure that you integrate these tasks into your business development cycle.
So you’ve got your first contract compliance tasks done; now, you can start looking at expanding the SINs or line items offered on your GSA Schedule, as needed. Some items may have been cut during the clarifications and negotiations phases, or maybe you took the route of getting just one aspect of your business on Schedule to streamline the submission process. For whatever reason it is, most vendors will find that, as they become familiar with utilizing their Schedule, they have things they need to add to their Schedule. Post award modifications through the eMod portal is exactly the way to do this.
Generally, modifications to add products, labor categories, fixed services, or SINs to your Schedule is like a condensed version of the original submission process. GSA has guidance on any type of modification you may need to make.
New vendors often feel as though they hit the ground running once a Schedule contract is awarded and emails for required maintenance tasks start flooding their inbox. There is a learning curve to keeping your contract compliant, and it will become easier as you go as long as you stay on top of these tasks.
Managing a GSA contract can be a full-time job, so make sure you’ve allocated resources to this. Some contractors find that third party consultants are the best solution to this new administrative load. That’s where the experts at Winvale can step in. If you’re interested in learning more about what we offer for contract maintenance and compliance, contact us today.