How a government IT contractor cut RFP form filling from 10–15 minutes to under 2
Pins Inc. builds technology solutions for state and local governments. Every request for proposals (RFP) it answers comes with attachments, such as equal pay disclosures and minority employee reports, and most arrive as flat PDFs that cannot be typed into. With Instafill.ai making each attachment fillable in seconds and filling it from one company profile, a form that took 10–15 minutes now takes under 2 minutes.
At a glance
- Company Pins Inc.
- Industry IT services for government contracting
- Location United States
- Forms State and local RFP attachments, about 20 a month
-
Results
Under 2 min per form, down from 10–15 minutes
25 s to make a flat form fillable
20+ government forms a month - Form categories Government procurement forms, Bidder declaration forms
- Download Minnesota RFP Attachments A–E (PDF) (Rev. April 2025, fillable)
The challenge
Pins Inc. handles 2–5 forms per RFP, about 20 forms a month, and they rarely repeat. Every jurisdiction issues its own version: Minnesota RFPs include standardized Attachments A–E for compliance reporting, while Oklahoma packets often contain state forms such as the Affidavit for Filing with Competitive Bid and the Oklahoma Vendor/Payee Form (SAI Form 425). California's forms differ from Georgia's, and Atlanta's from Athens'.
The company's addresses, contacts and certifications stay the same, yet every form meant typing them in again. Filling by hand in Adobe Acrobat or Google Docs was slow on checkboxes, tables and multi-page layouts. Earl Knight could create fillable fields with other tools, but their auto-fill was not reliable, and each RFP cost hours. With plans to answer three RFPs a week, that put submission deadlines at risk.
"Most of my forms will not be supported by your database because you need them to be interactive with some field already there, correct? How do we solve this problem?"
— Earl Knight, Pins Inc.
The solution
Each flat attachment first goes through flat-to-fillable conversion, which reads the layout (underscores, colons, spacing) and places text fields and checkboxes where the form expects them, across multi-page layouts. Tables come out mapped for row-by-row table filling. Converting Earl's first government form took 25 seconds; placing its fields by hand would have taken more than 30 minutes.
Pins Inc.'s standard information lives in one reusable company profile: company name, address and contacts, tax ID and business registration numbers, equal opportunity and diversity certifications, insurance and key personnel. For each RFP, Earl opens the PDF form, fills it from the profile and downloads the completed form.
As his needs grew, Earl began building a government proposal platform that generates proposals, manages documents and fills forms in one place. Rather than rebuild form processing from scratch, he connected it to the Instafill.ai form filling API through two endpoints: one creates a session from a form and its data, the other checks its status and returns the completed PDF.
The results
"That literally looks perfect. Yeah, this is literally exactly what I need."
— Earl Knight, Pins Inc., on his first converted government form
| Before | With Instafill.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Time per form | 10–15 minutes | Under 2 minutes |
| Fields on a flat form | 30+ minutes of manual placement | Converted in 25 seconds |
| Company information | Typed into every form | Kept once in a profile |
Pins Inc. now processes 20+ government forms a month across state and local jurisdictions without a manual bottleneck. Field placement is near-perfect, with a manual review available for unusual layouts. The company can produce more proposals without adding administrative staff, and what began as a subscription for Earl's own forms became an API integration inside the platform he is building.
Minnesota RFP Attachments A–E
Minnesota RFPs include Attachments A–E for compliance reporting. This set, revised April 2025, runs to seven pages: A, Responder Declarations; B, Exceptions to the State's Terms and Conditions; C, Cost Detail; D, the Workforce and Equal Pay Declaration; and E, a Reference Form.
Each solicitation carries its own set, and this one's Cost Detail belongs to a website design and development project. Use the attachments of the RFP you are answering, as posted with it, for example in this Minnesota Public Employment Relations Board RFP.
You can download Minnesota RFP Attachments A–E (PDF): a blank, fillable copy of the Rev. April 2025 set.
