Arcvue
Financial intelligence—across every entity
At two in the morning nothing has changed. By seven there are answers that did not exist.
Arcvue consolidates multi-entity financials on the ledger it already runs—and where an acquisition has left a second entity on a legacy system, across that one too, without moving its books. This page follows one night of it, for two invented companies on two different systems.
Specimen Systems LLC · an example 120-person contractor · all figures synthetic
Two companies, two ERPs, and the whole argument is that neither one moves.
Nothing is inherited yet, and that is the condition everything after this depends on. Specimen Systems LLC runs one ERP. Specimen Federal LLC—wholly owned, legally separate—runs a different one. Neither is going to be migrated tonight, or this year.
That is not a limitation being worked around. It is the ordinary GovCon structure. An acquisition is almost always a stock purchase, so the acquired company keeps its own contracts, its own past performance, its own clearances, and its own legal identity. Novating those contracts needs the government's agreement, which takes months and may never come. So the entity stays, the books stay separate, and somebody reconciles two sets of financials by hand every month—for years.
What is NOT being claimed. Not that we consolidate your ERPs. Not that you move to ours. The claim is narrower and harder: both systems stay exactly where they are, and the consolidated view exists anyway by morning.
Synthetic. Two invented companies that do not exist. Follow it down—nobody migrated an ERP, nobody re-keyed a ledger, and every figure above can still name the transaction it came from.
Each system is read through its own adapter, and what arrives is transactions rather than reports.
The two untouched systems from stop 01 are read, not written to. Each connects through an adapter built for it—the platforms in this industry are UNANET, Costpoint, QuickBooks, JAMIS, and a long tail—and what comes back is the transaction detail, not somebody's month-end PDF.
The distinction decides everything downstream. A report is an answer to a question somebody already asked; transactions are the material every later question is answered from. A system that ingests reports can only ever re-present them, which is why the four things that appear later tonight are not four features—they are four readings of the same rows.
Two charts of accounts become one vocabulary, and a person signed off on the translation.
Two raw streams arrived at stop 02 speaking different languages. Account 5100 in one system carries what account 6200 carries in the other. Nothing can be added together until that is settled.
The mapping is proposed by classification and confirmed by the controller—once, during onboarding. After that, accounts appearing for the first time are classified automatically against the confirmed vocabulary. There is no annual re-mapping exercise and no consultant, because the thing that made it correct was a human decision that got recorded rather than a model that has to be re-run.
| Parent account | Subsidiary account | Common meaning | Confirmed by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5100 | 6200 | Direct labor—contract | Controller, at onboarding |
| 50.30 | 6410 | Subcontract labor | Controller, at onboarding |
| 93.31 | 7905 | Unallowable—entertainment | Controller, at onboarding |
| New accounts after onboarding | — | Classified automatically against the confirmed vocabulary | Sampled, not re-mapped |
Screen Arcvue account normalization, tenants Specimen Systems LLC and Specimen Federal LLC. Basis the semantic map is human-confirmed only. No adapter, inference layer, or background process writes to it—which is what makes a consolidated statement defensible rather than merely produced. Synthetic sample.
Consolidation turns out to be mostly subtraction, and this is the step spreadsheets forget.
Adding the two companies up is the easy half.
One vocabulary came out of stop 03, so the two ledgers can finally be spoken about together. The instinct is to add them. The parent charges the subsidiary a management fee of $45,000.00 a month—$270,000.00 across the period—and that fee is genuine revenue in one company's books and genuine expense in the other's. Add the two companies up and the group appears to have earned $270,000.00 from itself.
So it is identified and removed on both sides, every night, without anyone remembering to. Management fees, due-to and due-from balances, intercompany revenue. The elimination runs with the sync, and the consolidated balance sheet foots because the elimination ran—not because somebody checked it afterward.
| Leg | Entity | Booked as | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income | Specimen Systems LLC (parent) | Management fee income | 270,000.00 |
| Expense | Specimen Federal LLC (subsidiary) | G&A expense | 270,000.00 |
| Balance | Both, at close | Due-from / due-to, one month unsettled | 45,000.00 |
Screen Arcvue intercompany elimination, nightly. Read this one leg by leg, not as a column. The three amounts do not add up to anything and no total rule is drawn under them—they are two sides of one fee plus the part of it still unsettled. Basis eliminations derive from intercompany-tagged GL entries. Each entity keeps its own books; the rollup is computed, not re-keyed. Synthetic sample.
The effect on consolidated net income is $0.00—income of $270,000.00 in one company against expense of $270,000.00 in the other, and the due-from of $45,000.00 against a due-to of the same. Nothing about the group changed; only the appearance of it would have.
Elimination is a statement about the group. Inside Specimen Federal LLC the fee is still real cost: it sits in that entity’s G&A pool and allocates across its contracts, so it moves the indirect rates that entity bills on—in a period where the consolidated statements show no effect at all. Two correct answers to the same $270,000, and a system that keeps only one of them misstates whichever it dropped.
And the claimable amount is not the fee. FAR 31.205-26(e) requires transfers between organizations under common control to be allowed at the transferring organization’s cost incurred rather than the price charged, outside a narrow commercial-pricing exception. A management fee set for tax or legal reasons is therefore not automatically the number that may reach a government invoice. Where CAS applies, the route is prescribed rather than chosen: 403 governs how home office expense reaches a segment and 410 requires what arrives to land in that segment’s G&A pool.
The statements exist, and the group's revenue is not the sum of the two companies.
With the intercompany removed at stop 04, the group can be stated. Consolidated revenue for the six months is $19,890,000.00—and the arithmetic is worth doing slowly, because the difference between it and $20,160,000.00 is the entire reason this step is not a spreadsheet.
Screen Arcvue consolidated statements, FY2026 through June. Basis the parent's $15,900,000.00 is the same figure the money chain and the accounting page are built on. Nothing was restated to make this page work. Synthetic sample.
The balance sheet is produced the same way and is verified to balance after intercompany elimination rather than before, which is the only ordering that means anything. Year-over-year comparison and variance come out of the same pass, because they are readings of the rows rather than reports somebody has to build.
The indirect rates are recomputed from the actual pools, and they are computed for each company separately.
The statements at stop 05 came out of pooled cost, and those pools are the same material the rates are struck from. Somewhere in most organizations there is an indirect rate model somebody built years ago; one person understands it, and it is updated once a year if that.
The parent's computed rates—fringe 28.4%, overhead 22.7%, G&A 11.9%—are last night's pools divided by last night's bases. Nobody types them. When someone is hired, when a contract ends, when spending moves between pools, the change is visible the next morning rather than at the next annual recalculation.
What this page computes is the actual rate the books are producing. What the accounting page allocates with and the timekeeping page burdens a day with is the filed provisional rate—a different set, held separately, negotiated before the year opens and revisable under FAR 42.704 while it runs. The two move apart as the year goes on, and that gap is not an error: on cost-reimbursable work it is the year-end settlement, and on everything else it is the difference between the margin you are reporting and the margin you are earning. It is why the accounting page carries a drift monitor rather than a single number.
Per entity, and combined. The subsidiary's cost structure is not the parent's, so a single group rate would misprice both. Rates are struck for each entity on its own pools and for the combined structure, and Arcvue's pricing module, contract forecast and scenario planner all read the live figure rather than a static input somebody has to remember to update.
Keeping two fringe pools apart is worth 5.10 points on an SCA bid, and here is the arithmetic.
Stop 06 struck rates per entity. It also struck them per pool, and that is where a simplification quietly costs money. Firms performing Service Contract Act work carry separate SCA and non-SCA fringe pools, because the fringe obligation genuinely differs by labor category. A system that reports one blended fringe rate is not summarizing—it is introducing an error into every bid.
Screen Arcvue pool configuration, Specimen Federal LLC. Basis the two errors do not cancel. The SCA position is understated by 5.10 points and the non-SCA position is overstated by 3.40—and they land on different bids, so one is lost on price and the other is won at a loss. Synthetic sample. Rates shown on the subsidiary, whose pools are its own; the parent's 28.4% is unaffected.
Arcvue tracks whatever pool structure the accounting system actually uses—multiple fringe pools by labor classification, multiple overhead pools by division or contract type, segmented G&A. The rates that reach a pricing proposal reflect that structure rather than an average of it.
Thirteen weeks forward, anchored on the bank balance rather than the ledger.
Everything to this point has been accrual. GovCon ERPs are built for cost accounting and contract billing, and the forward cash position is the report that either did not exist before or existed as a spreadsheet somebody maintained beside the ERP.
You enter today's bank balance and the picture anchors on it: eight weeks of actuals showing how you arrived there, thirteen weeks of projection showing where you are going. The projection comes from observed behavior—collection patterns by client and contract type, payroll cadence, vendor payment behavior, draw history—rather than from somebody typing in every expected inflow.
Screen Arcvue treasury, thirteen-week forward view. Basis this walk is CASH and does not reconcile to the accrual trial balance—deliberately. Your ERP balance and your bank balance routinely differ, and the bridge between them is the thing accrual statements cannot show. Forcing the two to agree here would delete the gap this view exists to explain. Synthetic sample.
Receivables and payables age invoice by invoice—current, 31–60, 61–90, 91–120, and beyond—with contract and client detail, so a collections conversation happens at the level it can actually be had. That timing feeds the forecast rather than being approximated into it.
Five derivations later, every figure is still one hop from a transaction.
And it is stop 01 that made that possible.
The night produced a consolidated P&L, a balance sheet that balances after elimination, a set of rates per entity and per pool, and a cash position thirteen weeks out. Each of those is several derivations away from any row a bookkeeper ever typed. The question a CFO should ask of any of them is the same one an auditor asks: where did this come from?
The answer is short, and the reason is the thing that looked least impressive at 02:00. Nothing was migrated. The source systems still hold the transactions, untouched, so every consolidated figure resolves back to the ERP row it was computed from—one hop, not a reconstruction. Had the data been re-keyed into a new ledger, the trail would end at the re-keying and every number above would be an assertion.
| The figure | Appeared | Resolves to | Stop |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19,890,000.00 | 03:40 | Two entities' revenue accounts, less tagged intercompany entries | 05 |
| 270,000.00 | 03:05 | Six monthly management-fee entries, both legs | 04 |
| 28.40% | 04:20 | Fringe pool over its base, both computed from posted cost | 06 |
| 29.50% | 05:10 | Two pool rates weighted by the labor base—and shown so it is not used | 07 |
| 2,086,400.00 | 06:00 | An entered bank balance and four movement streams | 08 |
Screen Arcvue lineage, consolidated view FY2026. Basis role-based access applies to all of it—division leads see their division, executives see the group, and a lender sees what you choose to share. The lineage does not change with the reader; only the scope does. Synthetic sample.