Every 5 years your GSA Contract comes up for renewal. As long as you have met the annual sales requirement of $25,000 and there are no glaring compliance issues, then you should be alright. The process has been improved recently, and I just wanted to go over the changes, and how you can prepare for the GSA renewal process.
The biggest challenge in the renewal process is getting your GSA Contract up to speed with some of the more recent requirements. The GSA is starting to require that someone within the company have a Digital Certificate, in case you fire your consultant. Without a Digital Certificate, you are unable to access the E-Offer system to make modifications to your GSA Contract. Some older contracts may not even have an Authorized Negotiator listed on the contract, or an often happening is that the in-house Authorized Negotiator has moved on, and the Point of Contact information has never been refreshed.
The Basis of Award, or BOA, information may have changed in a companies commercial practices, yet not been carried over into the GSA Contract. For example, lets say you submitted that your commercial discount is 5%, and the GSA will get an additional 2%, which makes for a 7% GSA discount. If your commercial discount changes to 10% along the way, then you are contractually obligate to adjust your GSA discount accordingly, to 12%. GSA Contract renewals are a good time for the GSA and Contractor to re-establish the BOA and make sure compliance is met, otherwise you may be sending some checks out on all of your GSA sales from your non-compliant period.
Another very common issue, which is easily fixed, is having expired CCR and ORCA records. THis is fixed by logging into the systems and re-certifying your records. Easier said than done, the CCR is easy enough but the ORCA is a beast to navigate. You aren’t done until the final page tells you so.
Some Contractors have outstanding Mass Mods, which are issued periodically to bring GSA Contracts into the most current Terms & Conditions. Otherwise, a GSA Contractor from 1995 would have entirely different requirements and rules than a new GSA Contract holder, and this would be unfair. So the Mass Mods bring older contracts into the most recent refresh of the agreement or solicitation.
These are the major pitfalls of the Renewal process, and it is a good idea to run a check on them as soon as your Contracting Officer (CO) contacts you with the 6 month warning that your renewal is coming up. If you have some issues, but you catch them and disclose them to your CO along with solutions, then you will be at less risk of losing your GSA Contract as a result.
