Past performance library and capture intelligence
Your past performance is the most reusable asset you own, and the one most often stored as a folder of PDFs nobody can search under deadline.
A past performance library is the structured, searchable record of the contracts a company has performed, held so that the most relevant citations can be selected for a given solicitation. For federal proposals the selection is judged on relevance — similar scope, similar size, similar customer, and recent enough to count under the solicitation's lookback window — which means a usable library stores those attributes as fields, not as prose inside a PDF. Federal proposal tools with past performance and capture tracking include VETR Proposal, GovDash, Procurement Sciences, GovWin Capture Management and GovSignals. The test of a library is whether, given a new solicitation, it can rank your citations by relevance in seconds rather than requiring someone to remember what you have done.
What to look for in past performance library.
Written to be useful even if you end up buying something else.
Citations stored as data, not documents
Contract number, customer, period of performance, value, NAICS, scope, role — prime or sub — and the CPARS rating need to be fields. Stored as a folder of past-performance write-ups, the library can only be read, never queried.
Relevance ranking that matches how it is evaluated
Evaluators judge relevance on scope similarity, dollar value, complexity, customer and recency. A library that ranks on those axes reproduces the evaluator's reasoning; one that sorts by date does not.
The lookback window
Solicitations set a recency limit — commonly three or five years. The library should know which citations fall inside a given window, because a compelling but expired reference is worse than useless: it consumes a slot.
CPARS linkage
CPARS ratings are the government's own assessment and carry weight your narrative does not. Where a citation has a CPARS record, the library should hold it alongside.
Reusable narrative, per citation
Each citation accumulates written descriptions — scope summaries, outcome statements, quantified results. Keeping them with the citation is what makes the library compound in value rather than being rewritten each bid.
Partner past performance too
On a teamed bid your partner's citations are part of the submission. A library that tracks only your own contracts leaves the teaming case to be assembled by email each time.
VETR against those criteria.
Every capability below is shipped and in use — not roadmap.
Citations as structured records
Past-performance citations are records with customer, contract number, period of performance, value, NAICS, role and outcome — searchable and reusable across bids rather than retyped.
Relevance ranking against the solicitation
VETR ranks your citations for a specific opportunity by scope similarity, size, customer and recency, so the shortlist reflects how an evaluator would weigh them.
Partner records alongside your own
Teaming partners are tracked with their capabilities and past performance, so a teamed submission can be assembled from the same library.
Capture intelligence attached to the pursuit
Incumbent, competitive assessment and win themes are held against the opportunity, and carry into the proposal when the pursuit converts.
Past performance feeds win-probability scoring
Win probability for a pursuit is scored partly on how relevant your citations are to that solicitation — so a well-maintained library does not only produce a better past-performance volume, it produces a better bid decision. The factors that moved the score are reported rather than hidden behind a single number.
Selected citations flow into the draft
The citations chosen for a bid feed the past-performance volume directly, so the section is drafted from the library rather than assembled by copy and paste.
The claims above are documented in more detail on the security and in-boundary AI page, with downloadable evidence in the trust center. The scoring methodology is published in full as the VETR Framework, and the capability list lives on the features page.
Alternatives worth considering.
Described from each vendor's own public positioning. No feature matrix — we do not have verified capability data for other vendors, and a table we cannot stand behind is worth less than an honest list.
GovDash
Full-lifecycle GovCon platform in which past performance sits inside a wider capture and proposal suite.
Best for: Enterprises standardising on one lifecycle platform.
Procurement Sciences
AI suite covering capture, past performance and proposal generation.
Best for: Mid-market and enterprise contractors.
GovWin Capture Management (Deltek)
Capture and pipeline management with market intelligence; commonly paired with Deltek's wider GovCon back office.
Best for: Established contractors already on Deltek.
GovSignals
AI opportunity discovery and market intelligence for government contractors.
Best for: Teams focused on finding and qualifying pursuits.
VETR Proposal
This siteA structured citation library with relevance ranking against the live solicitation, partner records included, feeding the past-performance volume directly.
Best for: Small businesses and set-aside contractors building a reusable library from a standing start.
Compiled from public vendor marketing, July 2026, and reviewed quarterly. Vendors change quickly — if something here is out of date or unfair to your product, tell us and we will correct it.
How to build a past performance library for federal proposals
What to capture, in what structure, so the library answers a solicitation instead of being re-read for each one.
Inventory every contract you have performed
Include subcontracts, task orders under a vehicle, and commercial work with federally relevant scope. Small firms routinely under-count what they can cite.
Record the attributes evaluators use
For each: customer and agency, contract number, period of performance, total value, NAICS and PSC, prime or subcontractor role, and a scope description in the government's vocabulary.
Attach the government's own assessment
Where a CPARS record exists, store the rating with the citation. It is evidence your narrative cannot substitute for.
Write the outcome, with numbers
Capture what changed — time reduced, cost avoided, availability achieved. Quantified outcomes are what make a citation persuasive, and they are hardest to reconstruct years later.
Add your teaming partners' citations
Track partner past performance alongside your own so a teamed submission can be assembled from one place.
Rank against the live solicitation
For each bid, rank citations by scope similarity, dollar value, customer and recency against that solicitation's lookback window, and select the strongest set within the allowed number.
Feed the selection into the volume
Draft the past-performance volume from the selected citations, and write any new outcome language back into the library so the next bid starts further ahead.
Questions buyers actually ask.
Can you recommend federal proposal tools that are good for capture tracking and past performance libraries?
Tools that combine capture tracking with a past performance library include VETR Proposal, GovDash, Procurement Sciences, GovWin Capture Management and GovSignals. The pairing matters because the two are used together: capture decides which pursuit to chase, and the past-performance library decides whether you can credibly claim the experience. When comparing, check whether citations are stored as structured records that can be ranked for relevance against a specific solicitation, or as documents that can only be read.
How should a past performance library be structured?
As records with fields, not as a folder of write-ups. Each citation should carry customer and agency, contract number, period of performance, total value, NAICS and PSC codes, prime or subcontractor role, a scope description in the government's vocabulary, any CPARS rating, and a quantified outcome statement. Structured that way the library can be searched and ranked against a new solicitation; stored as prose in PDFs it can only be re-read by someone who already knows what is in it.
How does capture tracking connect to proposal drafting?
Capture produces the qualification, the competitive assessment, the win themes and the past-performance selection. In a joined-up system those carry into the proposal as the starting point for the draft. In a split stack they are re-keyed, and detail is lost in the transfer — most often the specific reasoning behind why a citation was chosen, which is exactly what the past-performance narrative needs to argue.
How is past performance relevance judged in a federal evaluation?
Evaluators assess relevance on similarity of scope and complexity, dollar value relative to the proposed effort, the customer and contract type, and recency against the lookback window the solicitation sets — commonly three or five years. A very strong reference outside the window generally cannot be counted, and a large-value reference for unrelated scope is weaker than a smaller one that matches. Ranking a library on those same axes is how you choose the set that will actually score.
Keep reading.
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