For GovCon companies, external auditors, and outsourced accounting firms. The difference between a six-week audit and a four-month one is whether the documentation exists before the auditor asks. The difference between a client relationship that grows and one that erodes quietly is whether you can give clients more than just closed books.
For the company: Every audit starts the same way—finance spends three weeks assembling documents that exist across different systems in different formats. Indirect rate history requires reconciling years of cost pool calculations never formally documented in one place. Documents assembled under deadline are more likely to have inconsistencies. One inconsistency expands the audit scope. The auditor who finds something in one area starts looking harder at everything else. The six-week audit becomes four months not from one fatal problem, but from accumulated doubt created by the first finding.
For the external auditor: The preparation work that should be on the client's side ends up on yours. You're requesting documents, waiting for them, reconciling what arrives, and going back for items that didn't come through clearly. You can't assess readiness before the engagement starts because you don't have access to the underlying data until the client provides it. Every hour spent on information gathering is an hour not spent on actual audit work—and a direct constraint on how many engagements your firm can take on.
For the outsourced accounting firm: You're focused on closing the books. Your clients understand that—and they don't bring up reporting because they know you're already at capacity. But they want it. The CEO who never asks about live dashboards is quietly deciding whether the firm can support where the business is going. They don't have the conversation. They eventually insource a controller or find a larger firm. You lose the client without ever knowing why the relationship changed.
The Arcvue audit export package generates a 19-tab PBC workbook on demand from live ERP data. Trial balance. Revenue summary by contract. AR aging with invoice-level detail. AP aging with subcontractor payables tracked separately. Indirect cost pool breakdown with pool composition, computed rates, and GL reconciliation—the exhibit that takes longest to prepare manually and matters most to auditors of GovCon companies. GL detail for revenue and direct labor. Subcontractor payable schedule. Debt covenant calculations. Debt amortization by instrument. Unbilled AR schedule.
Items fully populatable from ERP data arrive complete. Items requiring external data—payroll registers, bank statements, incorporation documents—are pre-formatted in the correct structure, amber-flagged with source instructions. The auditor receives a workbook that's 70% complete before they've asked a single follow-up question. That's the difference between an audit that starts on solid footing and one that starts with three weeks of back-and-forth.
The same workbook serves transaction diligence, lender annual reviews, and covenant certifications. Every counterparty asks for the same underlying documents. Having them in organized, current, ERP-sourced form at all times means every audit and every diligence process starts from the same strong position—not from a sprint to catch up.
When your client is on Arcvue, the assessment begins before kick-off. Pull the trial balance. Review the AR aging. Check the indirect rate history for the periods under audit. Look at the cost pool composition. Identify areas warranting more scrutiny before you've sent a single PBC request. The engagement starts with a hypothesis, not with an information-gathering exercise that consumes its first six weeks.
During fieldwork, research your own questions directly. What was the G&A rate in March and what drove the pool composition that month? What contracts had the highest revenue in Q3? What's the unbilled AR balance and how long has it been outstanding? These questions used to require a client call, a wait, and a review cycle. With Arcvue access, you pull from the ERP-sourced platform. The answer is there in minutes, from the same source the financial statements come from. The client doesn't have to drop what they're doing to pull a report for you.
The per-engagement hours drop materially—not because the audit is less rigorous, but because information retrieval is no longer the rate-limiting step. That efficiency translates directly into capacity. The firm that can currently serve ten GovCon audit clients can serve significantly more with Arcvue-connected clients at the same total cost. That's the growth that doesn't require hiring—which is what every GovCon-focused CPA firm is looking for.
The clients who stop asking aren't satisfied—they've decided the firm can't give them what they need and they don't want to make the conversation awkward. The CEO who wants to know their indirect rates, their pipeline coverage, their 13-week cash position, their division-level margins—they know their outsourced accounting firm is stretched closing the books. They don't bring it up. They eventually decide they've outgrown the relationship. They insource or they upgrade. You lose the client without a single warning sign because there was never a conversation to warn you.
The deeper problem is that the firm genuinely couldn't have provided what the client needed without consuming capacity that was already fully committed. Running reports takes time. Building dashboards takes time. The CEO who secretly wants weekly margin reports isn't wrong to think the firm doesn't have the bandwidth. They're right. And Arcvue doesn't change that—it makes the question irrelevant. The reports run themselves from the ERP data you're already accessing to close the books. The CEO gets a live dashboard every morning. The division leads get their contract performance nightly. The board package goes out automatically on close. None of that work falls on the accounting firm.
The firm moves from “we close your books” to “we close your books and your CEO has real-time financial intelligence.” That's a different value proposition. That's a client who doesn't leave quietly—because they're getting something they couldn't get anywhere else without hiring someone. And it's a growth story for the firm: clients who previously would have needed a larger, more expensive provider can now be served by connecting their ERP to Arcvue as part of the engagement.
Arcvue computes fringe, overhead, and G&A pools nightly from actual ERP cost transactions. SCA and non-SCA fringe pools are maintained separately—the correct treatment for firms performing SCA work and the treatment DCAA expects. Provisional rates are tracked alongside actual rates so the annual true-up is documented automatically. The rate history is a continuous record built from source data, not a reconstruction under inquiry pressure. When DCAA asks, the package is a pull from the platform: monthly pool composition, computed rates, GL transaction support, and provisional-to-actual variance for every period in scope.
Every proposal submitted through Arcvue carries a complete pricing record at the time of submission: the indirect rates used and their ERP source, GSA ceiling rates by LCAT, escalation factors, and the assumptions behind each position's cost. The pricing audit workflow produces a formal attestation with digital signoff before the proposal goes out. That record is preserved in its exact submission-time state and retrievable at any point afterward. The post-award audit finds the documentation it expects to find—because it was created when the proposal was submitted, not reconstructed when the auditor arrived.
The close review tab adds monthly discipline. Every period when new actuals land, structured checks run against prior months, budget, and the forward forecast. Indirect rate movement is flagged when a pool shifts materially. Balance sheet anomalies surface for review. The misclassification that would become an audit finding in month five gets caught in month one—when it's a one-day correction, not a two-week investigation.