You won. Now the real work of building past performance starts, and it does not happen in a folder on your own computer. It happens in a government system called CPARS, and most new contractors never look at it until a contracting officer asks about their rating on the next bid.
We covered what to do when you have zero past performance. This is the next step: you have one contract, it is in progress or just closed out, and you need that contract to actually count for something.
Where your rating actually lives
The Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System is the government's shared repository for past performance ratings. FAR Subpart 42.15 requires an evaluation on most contracts above the simplified acquisition threshold, prepared at least annually and again at contract completion (FAR 42.1502). Every contracting officer who pulls your past performance on a future bid is pulling from CPARS, not from a reference letter you hand them yourself.
The process runs in stages. An assessing official, usually your contracting officer's representative or program manager, drafts ratings and a narrative. You get notified when it is your turn to respond. A reviewing official signs off if there is a disagreement. None of this happens automatically just because you delivered good work. Someone on the government side has to write it up, and your job is to make that easy and to show up when it is your turn.
Deliver, then document as you go
The strongest CPARS narrative is written by a program manager who has a paper trail to pull from, not a memory to rely on. Keep a running log while the contract is active: delivery dates against the schedule, any cost or scope changes, correspondence where the government confirmed something was on track. Do this in real time. Reconstructing it eighteen months later when you are prepping your next proposal is where the details get soft.
This is also where the relationship you built during performance pays off. A COR who has a clean written record of what you delivered writes a better narrative than one working from vague memory of "yeah, they were fine."
Respond to your evaluation. Every time.
Once the assessing official signs a draft evaluation, you get notified and have a comment window to respond, up to 14 calendar days for your comments to make it into the version that first goes live in the retrieval system (FAR 42.1503). Contractors skip this constantly, either because they missed the notification or assumed a rating of "satisfactory" wasn't worth the trouble.
It is worth the trouble. A short, factual, unemotional response, agreeing where it's earned and correcting anything wrong with specifics and dates, becomes part of your permanent record next to the rating itself. Evaluators reading your file later see both. Silence reads as agreement.
Do not guess at how CPARS works from what you've heard secondhand. The CPARS guidance document lays out the actual stages, timing, and rating definitions, and it is worth ten minutes the first time you're in the system.
What this buys you
One documented, well-rated small contract in CPARS is a real answer to "what's your past performance" on your next proposal. It does not guarantee your next bid. Nothing does. But a neutral or better CPARS record, backed by a reference who actually picks up the phone, moves you out of the "no relevant history" category the FAR requires evaluators to treat carefully in the first place.
Your board is the place to track when the next opportunity in your lane opens up while that first contract is still building your record.
Getting paid on time during that first contract matters just as much as the CPARS rating you end up with. Here's how WAWF and IPP actually route your invoice to payment, and where progress payments change the math once the contract gets bigger.