Arcvue
Arcvue Accounting—the GovCon ERP itself
Everything that has to happen to one invoice before a customer sees it—and potentially an auditor.
Arcvue Accounting is the general ledger itself: coding, indirect allocation, billing, three-way match, and the audit schedules that come out of them. This page follows Arcvue processing one subcontractor invoice from the day it arrives to the schedule an examiner reads.
Synthetic. An invented vendor submitting an invented invoice. Follow it down—one of these three lines is not billable to the government, and Arcvue finds out by asking rather than guessing.
Specimen Systems LLC · an example 120-person contractor · all figures synthetic
A subcontractor sends you a bill for $26,750.00.
It arrives as a PDF attached to an email, which is how almost every one of them arrives. Nobody has opened it, nothing has been coded, and the only party who knows what is in it is the vendor who wrote it. In government contracting the books are not paperwork you tidy up afterward—they are the instrument you are audited on, so what happens next is the product.
Everything below is the story of custody moving—from the vendor, to a machine that proposes, to a human who decides, to a ledger that will not accept anything neither of them confirmed. Watch the rail: it names who holds authority at each step. The figures tie to one another and to the homepage.
Invoices reach Arcvue four ways—a monitored mailbox, a bill-pay service such as Bill.com, a direct upload, and a bank or card feed, where what counts as an invoice is the bill from that bank or card issuer rather than the charges on it. The path does not change anything downstream, which is the point: the controls sit on the transaction, not on the door it came through.
The same invoice arrives through more than one door, routinely. Two feeds carry it, or two people forward the same PDF, and that is the ordinary case rather than the exception. Every document is hashed on arrival, so the second copy resolves to the one already on file instead of becoming a second invoice.
Before anyone opens it, the machine has already read it.
The $26,750.00 is now six structured fields and three line items, each carrying a confidence score and a pointer back to the region of the page it was lifted from. Nothing here has posted. This is a proposal, and the distinction is the whole architecture: the coding engine may only ever propose, and a separate executor is the only thing that writes.
A facsimile, not a screenshot. Underlined fields are the regions the extractor actually keyed on—green read cleanly, amber did not.
Exemplar rebilled a client dinner at $840.00 with no business purpose on the
invoice. If this was entertainment it is unallowable under FAR 31.205-14 and
belongs on 93.31. Was there a stated business purpose?
Screen Arcvue transaction coding, tenant Specimen Systems LLC, document MTS-4471. Basis confidence bands on the transaction-review surface are green ≥ 0.75, amber 0.50–0.74, red < 0.50; anything below 0.50 is escalated rather than coded. Synthetic sample. Exemplar Technical Services LLC is an invented vendor. No customer document appears anywhere on this site.
It does not guess the one field it is unsure about. It asks.
That $840.00 is the difference between a bookkeeping product and a compliance one.
A system that guesses is right most of the time, and the times it is wrong are exactly the times an auditor is interested in. So the confidence floor is not a quality metric, it is a refusal threshold: below it, nothing is coded and a question is raised in plain English against a named reviewer. It is not the only thing that parks a coding: anything flagged unallowable waits for a person too, every time, whatever the model's confidence. Of 419 documents in a sample month, 412 were coded on their own and 7 were not.
| Band | Rule | Documents | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green | ≥ 0.75 | 371 | Coded |
| Amber | 0.50 – 0.74 | 41 | Coded, flagged for sampling |
| Red | < 0.50 | 7 | Escalated—not coded |
| Total | 419 | 412 coded · 7 asked |
†371 + 41 = 412, which is the automatic population; the 7 red are the escalations. The two figures are one population counted two ways, not two claims.
Screen Arcvue transaction review. Basis confidence bands as enforced on the transaction-review surface. Other surfaces in the product band differently; this is the one that governs document coding. An example set. A sample of the work Arcvue does, not a total. Figures synthetic.
Escalation volume is not a defect rate. A queue of seven is Arcvue declining to invent seven answers—and the number a controller should watch is not how small it is, but whether the same question keeps coming back.
Stop 04 is why it does not.You answer once, and the answer becomes a rule with your name on it.
The controller replies that there was no stated business purpose. That reply does two things. It codes the $840.00 to 93.31 as unallowable entertainment. And it writes a rule—Exemplar, line description contains "dinner", no purpose stated → 93.31—against this tenant, carrying who decided it and when.
The next Exemplar dinner does not reach the queue. That is what makes the queue shrink without anyone lowering a threshold, and it is why the escalation count is a fair number to publish rather than one that quietly grows.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Trigger | Vendor Exemplar Technical Services LLC, line description contains “dinner”, no business purpose supplied |
| Codes to | 93.31 Unallowable—entertainment & alcohol |
| Authority | FAR 31.205-14 |
| Confirmed by | Controller, 2026-06-18 · recorded in the approval log |
| Scope | This tenant only. Rules are never shared between customers. |
| Effect | Subsequent matches code automatically and are sampled, not escalated |
Screen Arcvue coding rules, tenant Specimen Systems LLC. Basis a human confirmation is the only thing that writes a tier-1 vendor-to-account rule. No inference layer and no background process writes one. Synthetic sample.
Only now does anything reach the ledger.
Four legs. The unallowable $840.00 is separated at the point of entry, not found in March by a consultant reading the general ledger. By March it has already been in a pool, in a rate, and on an invoice—which is what makes finding it late expensive rather than merely late.
| Account | Description | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50.30 | Subcontractor costs—SS-CTR-2026-0087 CLIN 0002 | 24,710.00 | — |
| 50.40 | Direct travel—within FTR cap | 1,200.00 | — |
| 93.31 | Unallowable—entertainment † | 840.00 | — |
| 20.20 | Accounts payable—subcontractor | — | 26,750.00 |
| Totals | 26,750.00 | 26,750.00 |
†Booked to an unallowable account, so it is excluded from every indirect pool and every allocation base by construction rather than by a later adjustment. It still appears in the financial statements—unallowable is a government-billing concept, not a bookkeeping one.
The $840.00 is part of the $18,400.00 sitting on account 93.31 for the period, and the $24,710.00 is part of the $2,140,000.00 on 50.30. Both are on the trial balance at Stop 12.
Screen Arcvue general ledger, tenant Specimen Systems LLC, 2026-06-18. Basis a GL-mutating action cannot execute without an explicit human confirmation; the server does not accept the model's own assessment of whether confirmation was needed. Synthetic sample.
Posting is the line every statement is drawn against, and Arcvue draws it three ways rather than picking one for you. Pro forma is the business as it stands—posted plus everything still in flight—and it is what the statements return by default. Actuals is the closed-period view an auditor asks for: posted only. Variance is the difference, which is a direct reading of how much of the month has not landed yet.
And every statement carries how complete it is. If the period is 93% covered by dollar amount, the statement says 93% and names the gap. Running the business and defending the books are different questions, and a system that answers both with one number has answered one of them wrongly.
A direct cost is easy. This one has to be defended.
The $24,710.00 is direct—it belongs to a contract and stays there. But the firm around it does not: salaries of people who do not charge a contract, rent, insurance, the audit fee. Those sit in pools, and the government pays a share of them through a rate. How you computed that rate is the single most examined thing in a DCAA audit.
Arcvue runs it as an N-pool step-down, and it validates that the allocation sequence is acyclic before anything posts—because a pool that feeds a pool that feeds the first one is not an accounting error, it is an infinite loop wearing a suit.
| Allocated to | Base | Rate | Allocated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct labor, to contracts | 6,500,000.00 | 28.4% | 1,846,000.00 |
| Overhead indirect labor, into the OH pool | 780,000.00 | 28.4% | 221,520.00 |
| G&A indirect labor, into the G&A pool | 820,000.00 | 28.4% | 232,880.00 |
| Pool out | 8,100,000.00 | 2,300,400.00 |
†Pool in $2,300,400.00—the five natural fringe accounts. Residual $0.00.
| Pool | Pool | Base | Computed rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overhead—on labor plus fringe | |||
| Indirect labor 780,000 + fringe 221,520 + non-labor 893,022 | 1,894,542.00 | 8,346,000.00 | 22.7% |
| G&A—on the base this firm elected, total cost input | |||
| Indirect labor 820,000 + fringe 232,880 + non-labor 494,120 | 1,547,000.00 | 13,000,000.00 | 11.9% |
| Route A—sum the natural GL accounts | 14,547,000.00 |
| of which direct labor | 6,500,000.00 |
| of which subcontract | 2,140,000.00 |
| of which other direct | 619,458.00 |
| Route B—the G&A base plus the G&A pool | 14,547,000.00 |
| Difference | 0.00 |
A 6,500,000.00 + 2,140,000.00 + 619,458.00 + 2,300,400.00 + 1,673,022.00 + 1,314,120.00 = 14,547,000.00
B 13,000,000.00 + 1,547,000.00 = 14,547,000.00
Fringe appears once in Route A, as $2,300,400.00 of natural accounts, and is distributed three ways in Route B—into the direct burden, the overhead pool and the G&A pool. The two routes still meet to the penny. That is the check an auditor runs, and it is why this exhibit exists rather than a diagram of arrows. These are not independent sources—both read this ledger. What they are is two different additions of it, and fringe is the reason they could disagree. Direct labor is the tier-1 base above; the subcontract line is account 50.30 on the trial balance.
Screen Arcvue indirect cost allocation, tenant Specimen Systems LLC, FY2026 period 01–06. Basis three-tier step-down; unallowable costs ($123,700.00) are in no pool by construction. The sequence is validated acyclic before any leg posts. Basis the G&A base is an election, not a constant. Total cost input, value-added (total cost input less subcontract and material cost), and single-element bases are configured per tenant, and the step-down computes on whichever one you have disclosed. This firm elected total cost input. Synthetic sample.
A cost that is unallowable never enters a pool. It stays in the base—every item properly includable there bears its pro rata share whether or not the Government will accept it. Strip it out and the base shrinks, the rate climbs, and you have over-recovered on every contract you already billed. That is how a repayment starts.
FAR 31.203(d) and 31.201-6The rates you are billing at today are provisional, and that is the nuance.
You negotiate provisional billing rates before the year starts and bill on them while the year runs. They are not fixed for the year. FAR 42.704 lets either party revise them, prospectively or retroactively, to prevent a substantial overpayment or underpayment—so a contractor who can see a significant variance and leaves the filed rate standing is writing a finding for the incurred-cost audit. Firms that read their rates monthly file a revision mid-year. Firms that do not end up settling the whole year at once, in one number, eighteen months after the fact.
On cost-reimbursable work the settlement is cash. At year end you compute what the rates actually were and the difference is a receivable if you under-billed, a check back to the government if you did not. On time-and-materials the billing does not move at all—you bill the awarded rate whatever your indirects do. What moves is what you believe about the job. Run your project status reports at provisional rates and the net margin on them is a rate assumption rather than a result: a firm carrying a three-point overhead variance has been reporting margin it does not have, on every project, for as long as the variance has been open.
So Arcvue recomputes every rate from the ledger as the ledger moves, sets it beside the rate you filed, and raises an alert on a per-category threshold in percentage points.
| Pool | Filed provisional | Computed to date | Drift | Threshold | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fringe | 27.6% | 28.4% | +0.8 pp | 2.0 pp | Within |
| Overhead | 26.4% | 22.7% | −3.7 pp | 3.0 pp | Over threshold |
| G&A | 11.4% | 11.9% | +0.5 pp | 3.0 pp | Within |
Overhead was filed at 26.4% and is running at 22.7%. Every voucher since January has recovered overhead at the filed rate, and the overhead base to date is $8,346,000.00—so $308,802.00 of what has already been billed will not survive the year-end rate. It is not lost money. It is money that goes back, and the longer the filed rate stands the larger the check. The revision under FAR 42.704 is the remedy, and June is when it is still an option rather than a settlement.
The computed column is not a second opinion. It is the step-down at Exhibit 6 read as a rate. The filed column is what was negotiated before the year opened. The monitor is the subtraction, run every time the ledger moves.
Screen Arcvue Indirect Rates, FY2026—a read-only monitor. Basis per-category thresholds in percentage points, configurable per tenant; the defaults shown are fringe 2.0, overhead 3.0, G&A 3.0. Authority FAR 42.704, provisional billing rates. Synthetic sample.
Some of it is not billable to the government at all, and that is decided at the account.
Your $840.00 dinner is now one line in a block of $123,700.00 that the government will not pay for. Compliance is built into the chart of accounts rather than applied to it: the 93.xx range is structurally excluded from every pool, so an unallowable cost cannot reach a rate even by accident.
| Account | Category | Authority | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| 93.31 | Entertainment & alcohol † | FAR 31.205-14 | 18,400.00 |
| 93.32 | Lobbying & political activity | FAR 31.205-22 | 26,500.00 |
| 93.33 | Interest expense | FAR 31.205-20 | 41,300.00 |
| 93.34 | Advertising & promotion | FAR 31.205-1 | 22,900.00 |
| 93.35 | Bad debt expense | FAR 31.205-3 | 14,600.00 |
| Excluded from every pool | 123,700.00 |
†Your $840.00 from Stop 05 is inside this line.
Arcvue's compliance knowledge base carries 44 distinct FAR 31.205 selected-cost clauses. The automatic unallowable engine decides the ones that account for the overwhelming majority of findings—entertainment, advertising, bad debts, contributions, lobbying, interest, travel, legal, fines. Everything else routes to a person with the clause cited, because a determination nobody can point at a clause for is not a determination.
Screen Arcvue unallowable cost engine. Basis account-level segregation; a 93.xx account is excluded from pools and bases by construction. Card transactions additionally force an unallowable determination from the merchant category, overriding a stale cached allowability. Synthetic sample.
What you may charge for it is not a number anyone types.
Two sources, structurally separated, and no path between them.
The day a pay rate and a billing rate are allowed to touch is the day a merit increase silently reprices a contract. So they live in different places and are read by different engines: billing rates come from the executed award document; pay rates come from the payroll adapter. Neither engine reads the other's column.
You negotiated $88.25 an hour with the subcontractor. You proposed, and the government awarded, $98.40 an hour for that labor category. The spread between those two negotiations is the markup—and on a time-and-materials contract nothing computes it, because it was settled before anyone worked an hour. The invoice bills the awarded rate, fully loaded, with fringe, overhead, G&A and profit already inside it. The subcontractor's bill is cost you carry. There is no markup line because there is nothing left to mark up.
Cost-reimbursable is the opposite, and deliberately so. There the government is paying your cost, so it is entitled to see the build: the subcontractor's hours, your subcontract handling rate applied to them, the G&A that follows, and the fee—each its own line, each naming the rate it used and the base it was applied to. That is the whole reason cost-plus needs provisional rates and time-and-materials does not.
Travel and other direct costs sit on the cost side of that line. Whether indirect may be applied to them follows the rate structure you have established with the government: rates you have submitted and that are not yet approved are rates you may not bill on.
FAR 52.232-7| Labor category | Hours | GSA ceiling | Less 8% | Billed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior systems engineer | 168.0 | 178.48 | 164.20 | 27,585.60 |
| Systems engineer | 152.5 | 106.96 | 98.40 | 15,006.00 |
| Technical analyst | 64.0 | 83.80 | 77.10 | 4,934.40 |
| Invoice total | 384.5 | 47,526.00 |
†The discount is applied to the schedule ceiling and rounded to the cent. Two of the three round down; the analyst rate rounds up—83.80 × 0.92 = 77.0960, which is 77.10. A rate card that rounds the wrong way on one LCAT is a finding.
- Source: the payroll adapter, exclusively
- Feeds: the GL, the pools, the ICS, the forecast
- Never appears on an invoice
- Source: the executed award, Section B, extracted from the document
- Feeds: invoicing only
- Never derived from what anyone is paid
Screen Arcvue invoicing, contract SS-CTR-2026-0087, June 2026. Basis T&M lines are hours × the contract's own billing rate for that labor category, bounded by the category's validity window so a re-mapped employee cannot bill on two nodes for the same hours. Synthetic sample. The same $47,526.00 is stop 05 of the money chain.
Billing rates, fixed-fee amounts, and fee percentages enter Arcvue from the executed contract document and from nowhere else. There is no second door.
And here is the one that fails.
Every exhibit so far has passed. So: a different purchase order on the same program, where three-way match has caught something. $161,900.00 has been paid against $154,200.00 of goods actually received. Arcvue will not net it, will not warn quietly, and will not let the next payment through.
| Test | Arithmetic | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Within ceiling | 240,000.00 − 178,600.00 = 61,400.00 | Pass—backlog remains |
| Paid ≤ received | 161,900.00 − 154,200.00 = 7,700.00 | Exceeds receipts accepted |
AP paid exceeds receipts accepted—investigate. The default match tolerance is zero: exact, not "close enough". A tolerance is configurable per tenant, and shipping it at zero is a deliberate choice—a tolerance is a decision about how much you are willing not to notice.
A purchase order running out of backlog is a procurement problem you solve in a week. The one that costs money is the contract above it: an incrementally funded award where the funded balance runs out before the period of performance does. Keep working and you are working at risk, with no obligation on the government to pay for it; stop and you have a delivery problem. Either way you cannot invoice past the funded ceiling until a modification is executed. Arcvue carries funded value, obligation and burn on every contract for exactly that reason—followed all the way through on Program Management.
The $7,700.00 does not vanish into a variance account. It is carried as a vendor overpayment receivable on 12.30 until it is recovered or written off—visible on the trial balance at Stop 12, which is the point: an exception that cannot be seen on the face of the books is not a control.
Screen Arcvue procurement, PO SS-PO-2026-0413. Basis three-way match across the purchase order, the goods receipt and the vendor invoice, with a default tolerance of zero cents. Synthetic sample.
None of this asks to be believed. It learns on your books, and shows you what it learned.
Six to twelve months of your closed books go in before anything is posted. Arcvue reads them in order—every transaction, the account it went to, the vendor it came from, the contract and project it was charged against—and builds this tenant's coding model out of them. Your own history is the specification. Nothing is inferred from a generic chart of accounts, because there is no generic government contractor.
What it takes from you is structure: your chart, your vendors, your contract and project coding, the recurring costs that always land in the same place. What it will not take from you is allowability. A cost sitting in a pool that FAR 31.205 keeps out of one is not a precedent to copy—Arcvue records it as an exception, cited to the clause, and does not learn it. That distinction is the design: a model that learned everything it read would learn your last system's habits and then defend them in an audit.
| What it read | Count | What it became |
|---|---|---|
| Transactions | 4,912 | The corpus, read oldest first |
| Vendors resolved to one identity | 318 | Name variants, trading names and misspellings collapsed onto one payee |
| Vendor-to-account precedents | 274 | Where this firm books this vendor, with the transactions standing behind it |
| Contract and project coding patterns | 61 | Which costs follow which award, and which are indirect |
| And what it declined to take as precedent | ||
| Costs found in a pool FAR 31.205 excludes | 37 | Recorded as an exception, not learned |
| Entertainment and promotion on an allowable account | 12 | Flagged with the clause, raised to a person |
†The 49 exceptions are not corrections to your prior books, and Arcvue never writes back to the system the history came from. They are why a controller reads this table before go-live: each one is a place the old coding and the FAR disagree, named and cited rather than absorbed.
Screen Arcvue bookkeeper training, tenant Specimen Systems LLC. Basis structure is learned from the tenant's own history; allowability is never learned, and is decided against FAR 31.205 with the clause cited on the determination. Arcvue never writes back to the system the history came from. An example set. A sample of the work Arcvue does, not a total. Figures synthetic.
Eighteen months later, somebody asks you to prove all of it.
This is the moment the whole page has been walking toward.
The incurred-cost submission is fifteen lettered schedules, A through O, due six months after your fiscal year closes under FAR 52.216-7. It is a firm-level submission rather than a contract-level one, which is why the time-and-materials work on this page ends up inside it: Schedules C and I carry direct cost by contract, for the year and cumulative, whatever the contract type. At most firms the package is a spreadsheet assembled over six weeks by someone who was not there when the transactions happened. Arcvue builds it from the ledger. Your $26,750.00 invoice appears in it by name—its subcontract labor on the direct-cost schedule, its vendor on the subcontract schedule, its $840.00 on the unallowable schedule, all of it carrying the same journal reference it was posted under in June.
| Schedule | What it carries | Built from |
|---|---|---|
| A | Summary of indirect cost rates—pool, base, provisional, actual, and the variance between them | The ledger |
| B | Summary of claimed indirect expense rates | The ledger |
| C | Direct costs by contract | The ledger |
| D | Subcontract information | The ledger |
| E | Consultant information | The ledger |
| F | Compensation analysis, employee by employee | The payroll ledger |
| G | Unallowable costs | The ledger |
| H | Contract briefs | The ledger |
| I | Cumulative direct costs by contract | The ledger |
| J | Subcontractor and vendor information | The ledger |
| K | Employee listing | The ledger |
| L | Organizational chart | You type it once |
| M | Certificate of final indirect costs | The ledger—an officer signs it |
| N | Contract funding status | The ledger |
| O | Other direct costs by contract | The ledger |
| Fifteen sheets, one per schedule, in one workbook | Fourteen from your own data |
†Two of the fifteen are not arithmetic, and neither is a limitation to be engineered away. Schedule L is your organizational chart—typed once and kept, because no ledger holds it. Schedule M is the certificate an officer signs, and a signature is the one thing no accounting system can produce; Arcvue builds the schedule underneath it from the same rates as Exhibit 5, so what is being certified is the ledger rather than a workbook somebody rebuilt. Everything else comes out of your own data: twelve schedules from the general ledger and Schedule F from the payroll ledger. An empty schedule renders as no data, never as a zero—a zero and an absence are different facts, and only one of them is a finding.
| Account | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|
| 12.30 Vendor overpayment receivable ‡ | 7,700.00 | — |
| 20.20 Accounts payable—subcontractor | — | 742,900.00 |
| 40.10–40.30 Contract revenue | — | 15,900,000.00 |
| 50.30 Subcontractor costs § | 2,140,000.00 | — |
| 93.31 Unallowable—entertainment § | 18,400.00 | — |
| All other accounts | 21,677,800.00 | 7,201,000.00 |
| Totals | 23,843,900.00 | 23,843,900.00 |
‡ the $7,700.00 exception from Stop 10, still on the face of the books. § both carry a piece of the invoice you followed: $24,710.00 inside 50.30, and $840.00 inside 93.31.
Screen Arcvue incurred-cost package, FY2026, tenant Specimen Systems LLC. Basis fifteen lettered schedules assembled into one workbook, one sheet per schedule, named Schedule A through Schedule O; a schedule that cannot be produced is logged and skipped so the package still ships. Synthetic sample.
What these twelve stops add up to has a name. The pre-award survey for cost-reimbursable work walks the SF1408 adequacy criteria—direct and indirect segregated, unallowables identified at the point of entry, cost accumulated by contract, billing tied to the ledger, timekeeping feeding the labor distribution—and this page just did each of them to one invoice, in order, except the timekeeping, which has its own page. Arcvue is built to those adequacy criteria. No software is DCAA-approved—DCAA audits your accounting system, not your vendor—and a vendor claiming otherwise has told you something about their other claims.
The three reconciliations that are not obvious.
Not the arithmetic. The places where two things have to agree.
Adding a column up is not a proof of anything, so it is not published here. What is published is where a number has to be reached twice and land in the same place: a pool that must allocate to nothing left over, a balance that must have two equal sides, and a total two independent routes must both arrive at.
B 13,000,000.00 + 1,547,000.00 = 14,547,000.00
CR 742,900.00 + 15,900,000.00 + 7,201,000.00 = 23,843,900.00
Every figure on this page is invented for a firm that does not exist. No customer's numbers, names, contracts, or screens appear anywhere on this site, and that constraint gets stricter as the site gets more convincing—because a page this specific is implicitly a promise about what a live demonstration will show.
It is your system of record from the first close you run on it.
Your closed books go in first, so the coding model is yours before it codes anything. Then it runs: documents in through four doors, coded or raised to a person, allocated through your own pool structure, billed off the executed award, and closed into schedules an examiner can read without asking you for a workbook.