Run a compliance pass on your SBIR proposal that has nothing to do with the science. Give it to someone who did not write the thing, with the solicitation open beside them, at least a week before the deadline. A proposal can be technically excellent and still never reach a reviewer, and the reasons are all on the list below.

Do this as a separate pass

Compliance and quality are different jobs and should not share a review session. When you check both at once, the reader drifts into arguing about the approach and stops counting pages. Schedule one sitting purely for the mechanical items, with a yes-or-no answer required on each, before anyone reopens the technical debate.

The checklist

  • Registrations active, not merely started. The federal entity registration, your Unique Entity ID, the SBIR company registry and any agency portal account must all be current on submission day. Several renew annually and none of them complete overnight.
  • Eligibility confirmed. Ownership, control and employee-count rules are set by statute and the SBIR Policy Directive, and investor ownership can change your status. This is general information, not legal advice — if there is outside investment in your cap table, confirm with your own counsel.
  • Page, font and margin limits. These are per-agency and per-solicitation. Take the numbers from the document you are answering, count the pages of the final PDF, and remember that some agencies count appendices and letters against the limit while others do not.
  • Every required volume present. Technical, budget, commercialization, forms, certifications, letters of support — whatever the current instructions list. A missing volume is a common rejection.
  • Budget arithmetic matches the narrative. Labor hours in the budget should match the effort described in the technical volume, subcontractor shares should respect the minimum share of work set by statute for SBIR or STTR, and the totals should add up. See our list of budget mistakes that sink applications. Indirect rates and allowability are a CPA question.
  • Proprietary markings only where permitted. Some volumes must be submitted unmarked, and blanket "proprietary" headers on every page can make a proposal non-compliant. The instructions state exactly how to mark data you want protected; follow that wording rather than your own NDA template. Background on rights is in who owns the IP from a federal grant.
  • File format and naming. PDF version, text-searchable rather than scanned images, size caps, and the exact naming convention if one is given.
  • Correct topic number on every place it appears.
  • Submit days early. Portals slow to a crawl near a deadline, and "the system was down" is not an accepted excuse.

Why a fresh reader finds what you cannot

You have read your own proposal too many times to see a missing form. A reader with the solicitation in one hand and your submission in the other, checking line by line rather than reading for sense, catches the mechanical failures in an hour. Give them the checklist above plus the solicitation's own instructions section, and ask for a yes or no on each item rather than an opinion.

If anything on the list is unresolved with less than a week to go, consider waiting for the next cycle. The mechanics of the whole sequence are in our SBIR application guide, and if you do win, the same discipline carries into reporting and milestones.

Projects House builds the technical substance behind Phase I proposals and prototypes. Reach us through the contact form.