Why The Concrete Index exists.

Ingestion. It reads several public sources: the City Record for award notices, the OMB capital plan for committed budgets, the School Construction Authority and MTA capital datasets, and Checkbook NYC, the Comptroller's system of record for registered and paid amounts. It also reads New York State open data on data.ny.gov, the MTA's and the State University Construction Fund's named-vendor procurement records, which attach a contractor name to MTA and State construction work, and the City's Doing Business Database, used behind the scenes to corroborate the contractor groupings.

Record linkage. One contractor files under many legal-name spellings and joint-venture entities. The pipeline links those to a single parent through a deterministic, hand-verified alias map. Each grouping is corroborated by a shared, distinctive identifier: a shared business address, with high-occupancy office towers and registered-agent suites excluded so a common address can never merge two unrelated firms, and, at the organization level, a shared principal officer or owner in the City's Doing Business Database, with common or non-distinctive principals discarded. No individual is named anywhere on the site. The match is exact and rule-based, not probabilistic and not machine-learned.

Deduplication. Award notices collapse to one record per procurement, and capital-plan budgets collapse to one record per project, since the source repeats a project's budget across every sub-project row.

Reconciliation. It carries three dollar measures per contractor: award-notice value from the City Record, plus registered contract value and paid to date, both from Checkbook NYC. They are held as separate reconciled figures and never blended into one number.

Nightly self-refresh. An automated job re-runs the ingestion and aggregation every night. Where a source cannot be read from the browser (Checkbook NYC allows no cross-origin request and returns a paged XML feed), the job fetches and normalizes it server-side and writes the compact static file the site reads, so the picture stays current without an analyst in the loop.

Surety and credit professionals. The “Contractors” page opens with a contractor lookup that pulls any account's public award history from the City Record in one query: what it has won, from which agencies, and how its job sizes are trending. Read against a contractor's financials, this is demand-side context those statements do not carry. A rising job-size trend is a demand fact, not a verdict. A book stepping up in size is taking on work of a different scale: context to read against the financials, not a risk rating. The “Funnel” and “Analysis” pages add portfolio color, whether a segment is thinning and where forward work is funded. The contractor lookup also shows a firm's MTA and New York State construction work, named from the State's own open data, on a separate ledger that is never summed with the City figures. The “Agencies” page profiles a single agency's committed-versus-awarded book, the trades it buys, the firms it pays, and a dollar-weighted borough footprint of where its work lands. The “Contracts” page is a per-contract lookup: I made it searchable by contract number, vendor, agency, the work's scope description, and the City's procurement identification number, so a query like a street name or a treatment plant surfaces the contracts that name it. Open one registered contract and it shows how much of that contract the public record confirms has been paid, the scope and PIN that identify it, and, for contracts of $500,000 or more registered since 2019 that are open or recently closed, a dated spend curve built from the individual checks with first-payment lag and pay-down speed. That paid figure is a floor built from confirmed disbursements. It covers the single contract entered rather than the market, and a balance below the registered amount can reflect work still in progress as well as payment not yet posted. The School Construction Authority and Port Authority remain unattributed, because those datasets carry no contractor name.

Brokers and agents. The “Pipeline” page and the “Bidding” page are a prospecting map. “Pipeline” shows committed-but-unspent capital by agency, borough, and category, the market where the next round of bonding demand is forming, often before it is advertised. “Bidding” shows every City construction solicitation open right now, sorted by what is due next.

Contractors. The “Bidding” page is a working bid-chase list: every open City construction solicitation, its due date, its procurement method and PIN, and the agency contact who answers questions, re-pulled on every load. The “Contractors” page adds competitive context, showing who has been winning what kind of work from which agencies, and how award dollars spread across the market by job size. The “Pipeline” page shows where funded work is stacking up before it is advertised.

Credit analysts and investors. The “Funnel” and “Analysis” pages give a public-market read on one of the country's largest construction economies, with the full method disclosed on each page. Backlog coverage, unspent committed dollars over trailing-year spending, is a market-level reading, the public-market analog of how a single contractor's backlog relates to its revenue. It describes the market, not any one firm; the per-vendor pages carry no revenue or backlog figure and none can be derived here.