Arcvue
Cost accounting—the three buckets everything indirect falls into
Three pools at minimum, and an order that is not negotiable.
Costs that support many contracts—insurance, rent, the CFO's salary—cannot be billed to one of them. They are collected into pools and allocated across all of them by a rate. There are three at minimum—fringe, overhead and G&A—and a firm with heavy subcontract content, work on a government site, or several divisions will run more. Each applies to a different base, and Arcvue runs the structure you actually have rather than the three below.
Fringe is everything it costs to employ a person beyond their wage.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Retirement match.
- Employer payroll taxes—FICA, FUTA, SUTA.
- Workers' compensation.
- Paid time off.
- Service Contract Act health & welfare, for wage-determined employees.
Total labor dollars—direct and indirect. Every employee carries fringe, including the ones who never touch a contract, so the pool is spread across all of them. When the rate is then applied to a contract, it applies to that contract’s direct labor.
Overhead is the cost of running the place the work happens in.
- Facility rent and utilities.
- IT infrastructure—equipment, licenses, networks.
- Project management tooling.
- Technical training.
- Operations management salaries.
- Security clearance processing.
Loaded labor—direct labor plus fringe. Overhead supports the loaded workforce: you need people, with their benefits, before you need somewhere for them to work and something to work with.
G&A is what it costs to be a company at all.
- Executive salaries.
- Accounting, legal, and compliance.
- Business development and proposal work.
- Corporate facilities.
Total cost input—everything beneath it. G&A supports the whole business, so it applies to the whole cost of delivering the work rather than to any part of it.
Applied in a different order the arithmetic does not become a different opinion, it becomes wrong: fringe does not contain overhead and overhead does not contain G&A. The cascade is worked end to end, with every step re-derivable, on the wrap rate page.
Your actual pool rates, computed from the ledger rather than asserted.
Indirect Rates shows what each pool actually came to for a closed period, and rate targets project them forward. Pricing uses them to build a proposal; contract forecasting uses them to project cost.