Company Culture and Accounting Systems
At first pass, this may seem like an odd combination of issues, but company culture has to be accounted for when changing accounting systems. Change Is Scary Your accounting staff is probably very...
View ArticleSYMPAQ User Wins Prestigious SBA Award
Congratulations to Judy K. Sheppard, President and CEO of Professional Services of America of Parkersburg, WV, on her award of the 2011 West Virginia Small Business Person of the Year. Judy was...
View ArticleService Contract Audits to Increase
This is via Centre Consulting. “The Dept. of Labor has dramatically increased the number of auditors devoted to reviewing government contracts for Service Contract Act (SCA) compliance. Enforcement...
View ArticleAre Your Subcontractors Adding Value?
Recent guidance from DCAA suggests that they may start disallowing certain indirect costs for the prime on contracts where the subs are doing more than 70% of the work. “Adding Value” is, of course,...
View Article4 Signs That Your GovCon Business is Outgrowing Quickbooks
You Need Accurate, Fully Burdened Cost Data QuickBooks has no native ability to calculate and allocate burdened costs. When you need burdened costs to support a cost-plus proposal or an audit, you...
View ArticleDid you save too much money on your accounting software?
We received a call the other day from an employee of a small subcontractor who was both stressed and overwhelmed. You see, their prime contractor recently told them that they need to submit four year’s...
View ArticlePreparing for a DCAA Accounting Systems Adequacy Audit
As a government contractor, your first face-to-face interaction with a DCAA auditor will likely be an Accounting Systems Adequacy Audit (Pre-award Survey). The audit does exactly what the title states....
View ArticleWhat in the Sam Hill is “FAR compliant” accounting software?
The Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) is comprised of 53 Parts, including three “reserved” parts that are without content. So, what in the many volumes of regulations contained in the other 50...
View ArticleSpreadsheets: You Are Doing It Wrong
Spreadsheets are wonderful tools. However, if you are manually updating spreadsheets each accounting period with the same information (sales numbers by task order, labor hours on projects, etc) and...
View ArticleSubcontractors need to be DCAA compliant too
Yesterday, I was speaking with a smaller contractor, a 12 person firm with no direct contracts with the government. All their work is as a subcontractor. One of their primes mandated that they get a...
View ArticleDCAA Approved Accounting Systems
We get a lot of visitors to this web site from the search term “DCAA Approved Accounting System.” So I thought this would be a good opportunity to clarify exactly what constitutes a DCAA Approved...
View ArticleDCAA Identifies Audit Priorities
A defense industry blogger at About.com is reporting that DCAA has identified a couple of areas of emphasis in their audit activities. Business Development vs Marketing: They will be looking closely to...
View ArticleSF 1408 – Adequacy Checklist
The back page of the Standard Form 1408 features the evaluation checklist that DCAA auditors use to determine the “adequacy” of a contractor’s accounting system. This form is used primarily when a...
View ArticleFirm Fixed Price Contract Audit Exposure
Fixed price awards don’t require cost accounting, you say? Every so often, we’ll hear government contractors provide us with words of wisdom to the effect, “We don’t need cost accounting software; all...
View ArticleDCAA Approved Accounting Software Redux
We received an e-mail recently on a topic that won’t seem to go away. In all the years we’ve been doing this, the legend of DCAA approved accounting software remains on par with the Loch Ness Monster...
View ArticleHow long will it take to implement your software?
Earlier this month, I was presenting our SYMPAQ product line to a CPA firm that specializes in government contractor audits and with DCAA compliance. While discussing pricing options, one of their...
View ArticleA-133 Audit Concepts
A-133 Audits roughly follow the same accounting and cost recovery guidelines as do federal contract awards that are governed by the FAR. OMB Circular A-122 “Cost Principles for Non-Profit...
View ArticleThe DCAA Blues
In a recent survey of federal contractors conducted by the public accounting firm Grant Thornton, close to one in five contractors report bad blood between them and the DCAA. Per the survey, “The...
View ArticleBI for government contractors
BI is short for “business intelligence”, but what do those words mean as they relate to your government contracting business? You hear and read much these days about the need for analytics, data...
View ArticleWhat do we mean by “flexible” accounting software?
As software publishers, we tend to promote our products as “flexible” when it comes to accounting and timekeeping features. But, what exactly does that buzzword mean? In this context, flexible means...
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