Procurement & Contract Review for Government Agencies

A contract redline went out for legal review two weeks ago. Nobody's heard anything back since, and there's no way to check on it besides sending another email and waiting to see if this one gets a reply. Meanwhile, a purchase order for something far smaller and far less contested sits finished inside the agency's financial system, fully approved, and someone still has to open it, save it as a PDF, and email it to the vendor by hand, the same way they did yesterday, and the day before that, for every single purchase that crosses their desk.

This isn't an isolated complaint. A 2025 audit by the New York City Comptroller's Office found that the city's own Law Department took more than four weeks to review roughly 38% of the procurement contracts it processed outside the city's tracking system, delays the audit attributed directly to a lack of consistent milestone tracking. In one case cited in the audit, a routine software contract renewal sat unapproved for nearly two months past its expiration date, despite repeated urgent requests. It's not isolated to one city, either. For the second year running, the National Association of State Procurement Officials' survey of all 54 state Chief Procurement Officers ranked modernizing the procurement process, digitizing solicitations, bids, contracts, and records, as the single top priority nationally.

What Procurement Actually Involves

The agency's financial system generally handles the transaction itself well: a division enters a requisition, it moves through a chain of approvers, a procurement manager signs off, and a purchase order gets generated inside the system. What that system was never built to handle is everything that happens around it, choosing the right contract vehicle before the requisition can even be entered correctly, getting a redline reviewed by legal, generating the paperwork and getting it in front of the vendor. That work still happens by hand, and in a lot of agencies it runs through one or two people who are also covering entirely separate responsibilities the rest of the week.

The same pattern shows up well beyond a standard purchase order. Sole source justifications, travel authorization requests, vendor applications and evaluations, grant management and distribution, federal funding applications, invoice and payment approvals, each of these has its own approval chain and its own paperwork, and in a lot of agencies, most of it runs through the same one or two people already covering the core procurement queue.

Where the Process Actually Breaks Down

Once a redline goes out to legal or another office for review, there's usually no way to check on it besides asking directly, and asking directly means interrupting someone else's day to get an answer that a shared system could have shown without anyone lifting a finger. Even where e-signature tools are already in place for the final signature, the actual review that happens before anyone signs anything has no visibility built around it at all.

The same blind spot shows up earlier, before a contract is even drafted. Staff sometimes have to stop and double-check which contract or purchasing vehicle a given purchase should go through, occasionally reaching out to a vendor's own sales contact to confirm which agreement applies, before the actual paperwork can even begin. That's a delay that happens before the approval process has technically started, and it rarely gets counted as part of how long a purchase actually takes.

It shows up again after everything's been approved. A purchase order gets created and approved inside the financial system, and then someone still has to save it as a PDF and email it to the vendor directly, a manual step that gets repeated for every single purchase regardless of size or complexity. Some agencies run bid solicitations the same way, sending requests out to a handful of resellers and then waiting to see who responds, tracking which vendors went quiet, and documenting the non-responses for the record before the process can move forward at all.

And running underneath all of it is timing nobody controls. A need that comes up mid-cycle often has to wait for the next budget cycle regardless of how urgent it feels in the moment, and purchases above a certain dollar threshold usually trigger a separate security or procurement review that most staff didn't realize they'd need until they were already partway through the process. None of this is arbitrary. It's how government manages risk and spending across every agency. But it does mean that timing, more than almost anything else, determines whether a genuinely good idea gets funded or quietly waits another year.

What People in This Role Actually Want

What people in this role actually want isn't a new financial system to replace the one they already know how to use. It's visibility into where a request or a redline actually sits at any given moment, and one fewer manual step between an approved purchase and a vendor who's still waiting to hear back.

The Knowledge Risk Nobody's Written Down

Which vehicle applies to which kind of purchase, which reviewer typically holds things up and why, how to handle a vendor who's gone quiet mid-bid, this tends to live in the head of whoever's handled procurement the longest, often absorbed over years of trial and error rather than written down anywhere official. When that person is out, even briefly, the process doesn't grind to a halt exactly, but it stops moving as smoothly, and everyone else spends more time guessing than they'd like to admit.

Three Things Worth Checking This Week

1. ‍Pick one contract currently under review. Can you say, without emailing to ask, exactly who has it and how long it's been there?‍
2. Look at the last purchase order you sent to a vendor. Count the manual steps between "approved" and "vendor notified." Most could happen without anyone touching them.‍
3. Ask what happens if whoever manages procurement forms is out for two weeks. Would anyone else know which vehicle applies to which purchase, or would it mean guessing?

What Actually Fixes This

Those three checks won't close the gap. They're diagnostic, and they'll show exactly where a request is most likely to stall next, which is usually more specific and more fixable than it feels from the inside. What they can't do is replace a system that tracks every review automatically, because manual checking, however diligent, still depends on someone remembering to do it.

None of this gets fixed by replacing your agency's financial system, and it shouldn't require that kind of disruption. It gets fixed by giving the steps that happen before a transaction, review, routing, generating the paperwork, a home that isn't a person's inbox. That's the work SimpliGov does. It's built to be configured by the people who already run this process, not handed off to an outside developer every time a contract type changes, and it keeps a record of how requests actually moved, who reviewed what and when, so a stalled contract has a visible history instead of a mystery.

One California higher education system's Office of General Counsel saw this play out directly. Agreements requiring sign-off from a supervisor, HR, accounting, the vice chancellor, and outside counsel were taking multiple months, with as many as five copies of the same document circulating by email at once. After moving that review into one tracked workflow, the office cut approval time by a third, with four new workflows live in under three months. In their words: "We're no longer in the dark about where something stands. If we want to know where an agreement has stalled, we can find out immediately." Read the case study →

If the checks above turned up something real, it's worth ten minutes to see what closing that gap actually looks like. See the platform →