Every figure in ENTEL is computed from archived source documents. No figure is entered by hand, every number opens the document behind it, and anything ENTEL judged rather than read is published as a rule you can check.
The corpus
Our sources run on their own cadences, from every three hours to monthly, and every document they return is hashed and archived on arrival. When a page changes under us the old version is still there, which is the only way to answer "what did this say when you told me that." This is the one page on the site that carries a count of the corpus, and it reads that count off the corpus when the page is published, so it is never a figure somebody typed and forgot.
Five of them, so you can judge the floor: the Federal Register, govinfo.gov, SEC EDGAR, the Department of Energy and the EIA. Those are the public record, and any serious desk reads them. What takes the months is the rest of the list, where they sit relative to each other, and which claim in which document moved which project. We name the floor and not the list, for the same reason a research desk publishes its method and not its notes.
Further sources are disabled, each with a recorded reason, and we keep that list. A source that was probed and failed is itself a finding. An empty feed and a broken feed look identical unless somebody recorded which one it was.
Every record that arrives carries one of five evidence classes, A to E. The classes and what each one takes are set out on the about page.
Judgment
A market segment opens on a project when its lifecycle type and current stage put it inside a window. ENTEL works that out rather than reading it off a filing, so the rule it used is published rather than described. Here is one in full.
Derived New build, stage: site secured
Site is permitted but no construction application is filed. Site characterization and early works scope firms up first, which is why civil moves ahead of hardware here.
Disagree with the rule and you can say exactly where, because the rule is a published object you can open.
What this does not yet cover
Everything above describes how project movement is graded. The federal market, meaning DOE and M&O recompete forecasts and the buying that follows them, is a different evidence object: a solicitation is not a project-stage event and rendering it as one would be wrong. It runs on its own ladder, and that ladder is not published yet.
The federal ladder is in the beta now. Ask us for it and we will walk you through it.
Check any count against its source.
A seat renders the source table and the grading table off the corpus, and every source with a public index links out to it, so any count on any page can be checked against the source that produced it.