Government Contracting Simplified

You'll need more than just a timesheet to do business with the federal government. On top of the cost accounting requirements that occupy your accounting team, DCAA regulations require an audit-trail that reaches all the way down to line employees.

The Costs of Non-Compliance

Unfortunately, DCAA audit requirements aren't relaxed just because you're a small business. Not only will the audit process be time consuming and costly if you are using an accounting system that does not support DCAA compliance, your bills may not get paid, and even your staff can be personally liable for gaps in the system.

Not all DCAA Compatible System are Equal

While most desktop packages claim to be DCAA compliant, many of them simply aren't. Your software vendor won't have to go through the audits your team will go through, and making the wrong choice can be costly. That fact pushes many small firms down the wrong path.

Some firms get drawn into spending $20-30K for accounting systems that were built for larger firms rather than run the risk of non-compliance. Eventually, the accounting system is so onerous, it ends up running the firm!

The smaller the firm, the more tempting a semi-manual approach to compliance can be. While collecting signed timecards and storing a paper trail to support cost allocations may work for 1-2 jobs, it becomes impossible to keep up as the company grows.

BigTime Provides a Simpler Solution

BigTime's Government Contractor's edition will give you the tools you need to setup a DCAA compliant process for tracking time and job costs, and we'll back it up with an easy-to-follow DCAA compliance packet.

We'll give you the same tools that more expensive systems provide, without shackling you to a complex accounting package. And, we'll let your team retire their paper-and-pencil.

DCAA compliance is as much about process as it is about software, but we'll get you on the right track with a host of features designed specifically with DCAA compliance in mind.

BigTime gives your staff members an easy way to track their time daily, and a simple interface for making changes to that time without invalidating your audit trail.

Not only will BigTime help you keep track of daily time entry, it will help you verify that you are preventing your users from logging time ahead (a practice that often leads to failed audits and lost revenue).

While most timesheet programs feature a time "submission" process, BigTime's DCAA Kit comes with a unique set of submission pages that let you use that process to collect an electronic signature from your employees. Your users will verify their timesheet data, read through the legal ramifications associated with signing that timesheet electronically, and then provide a name as a "signature" at the bottom of the page.

To help protect your audit-trail, the user must also re-enter their BigTime password (making the electronic signature verifiable).

BigTime's built-in timesheet review and approval process is extremely flexible. We allow you to decide whether timesheets should be approved by person, or by project, and we let you assign approval rights to several managers at your firm. We also let managers review and approve entries one-at-a-time, or en masse.

The DCAA version of BigTime does not allow the supervisor to make any changes to timesheet data. Managers can either approve timesheet data, or reject it -- sending the timesheet back to the staff member for revision and re-submission.

BigTime's audit-trail is one of the most versatile in the industry, and it's incorporated into the core product, so your users don't have to jump through hoops to activate it.

While DCAA requires you to log every change a user makes to their electronic timesheet from the moment they click SAVE, BigTime has several configuration options that let you tailor the audit-log rules to fit your accounting needs. In addition, the entire log has been incorporated into BigTime's Report Engine, so you can add audit-log data to your existing staff and project reports.

The DCAA Compatibility Kit ships with a number of reporting enhancements which take advantage of the information your system collects in the audit log.

The most important report is the one you select right off the bat: the Certified Timesheet report. The kit ships with a number of different formats, and each one provides a week-at-a-glance review of timesheet core data, adjustments, user comments and electronic approvals - all on a single page.

Not only will BigTime help you create a DCAA compatible entry and submission process, we'll give you exactly what you need to track other DCAA/FAR accounting data: direct vs. indirect fees; time allocation by labor type; overhead and fringe benefit rates (for the firm, or per-project) and more.


Call or register for more information, schedule a free personal demo or get access to a free trial of BigTime: 312-346-4646

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