Data

Every record shows where it came from.

Ballast is provenance-first: source links, retrieval times, confidence scores, verification status, and field-level change history on everything — so your team can trust an opportunity enough to act on it.

Sources

Source categories

Collection only runs against approved sources — every source passes a permission and licensing review before Ballast reads it.

Permit registries

County and municipal building & reroof permits.

Planning records

Site plans, zoning actions, development approvals.

Procurement portals

Public bids, roofing packages, deadlines, awards.

Company announcements

Project news, expansions, contractor activity.

Licenses & certifications

Contractor licensing and manufacturer programs.

Licensed data partners

Commercial datasets under explicit license terms.

Trust

Confidence, verification, and resolution

Records resolve into one canonical entity per real-world thing — a project, a contractor, a property — with version history for every change. Each carries a confidence score and one of six verification states:

unverified

Collected, not yet corroborated — delivered only if your policy allows, always labeled.

machine_verified

Cross-checked against the source and the record's own history.

multi_source_verified

Two or more independent sources agree.

human_reviewed

An analyst confirmed it — used for high-stakes records.

disputed

Sources conflict; the conflict is shown, not hidden.

stale

Past its freshness window — flagged until re-observed.

Customer data matching: your CRM accounts are matched against observed contractors so opportunities carry an account relationship (active, lapsed, prospect, unknown, do-not-target). Your customer data stays yours — it tunes your feed and never leaves your organization.

Honesty

Known limitations

What Ballast can't promise — stated up front, and repeated inside the product wherever it applies:

  • Some private projects don't appear until public documentation is published.
  • Contractor details may be unavailable at the earliest project stage.
  • Source update frequency differs by jurisdiction — feed freshness depends on when each source publishes.
  • Inferred values (likely material categories, purchasing windows) are estimates with confidence scores, never confirmed facts.
  • Field coverage varies by source; unavailable fields are delivered as null with evidence, not guessed.