Arcvue
The FP&A command center—for firms without an FP&A department
The larger firms do not have better instincts. They have better data, sooner.
Which is a structural advantage, and structural advantages compound. Arcvue gives a firm with no FP&A department the thing the department was for: a current view of the business, and a way to model a decision against it while the decision is still open.
If we lose the recompete, do we breach the covenant? That question normally takes a week, because somebody has to rebuild a model to answer it. Section III answers it in minutes, against the actual debt schedule.
Specimen Systems LLC · an example 120-person contractor · all figures synthetic
Your data is in the ERP. Your decisions are not informed by it.
A three-hundred-million-dollar contractor has a dedicated FP&A team, a pricing department, and analysts whose entire job is turning ERP data into decisions. A firm under a hundred million makes the same decisions—bid or no-bid, hire or wait, draw or don't—with the same stakes relative to its size, and without any of that apparatus.
The ERP is not the gap. It closes the books, records time, tracks cost, processes invoices, and does all of it correctly. What it does not do is turn that into a view you can run the business from. Closing that gap takes people, which is exactly what the smaller firm does not have.
Arcvue closes that gap without the headcount. The number arrives when the question does, not a week later.
By the time you have the number it is stale, and reconciling it costs another week.
The decisions still get made. They just get made without it.
This is the part that does not show up in any budget. Somebody asks what margin a division is running at. Somebody else pulls it, reconciles it against the forecast, and comes back the following week—by which point the question has either been answered by instinct or has stopped mattering.
Arcvue's nightly sync removes the question rather than shortening it. Income statement, balance sheet, indirect rates, and the full financial picture are current every morning. Actuals for closed months come from ERP transactions; open months roll forward on the current forecast; the two combine automatically so the view is always complete and always says which part of it is which.
And it reaches the people who can act on it. Division leads see their own performance nightly—revenue, cost, gross profit, margin, and burn by contract—without requesting a report from anyone. A problem that surfaces in week two is a different problem from the same one found at the quarterly review.
Model the decision before you make it, against your real debt and your real covenants.
If we lose this recompete, what does it do to cash? Do we need to draw on the line? Do we breach leverage? That is one question with three dependencies, and answering it by hand means somebody rebuilding a model with a different assumption in it.
| Reading | Today | If the recompete is lost |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue at risk | — | 6,868,800.00 |
| Contribution rate—revenue less direct labor and fringe | 34.2% | — |
| Earnings it carries, at that rate | — | 2,349,129.60 |
| Combined EBITDA | 3,840,800.00 | 1,491,670.40 |
| Leverage, against a 3.50× maximum | 1.19× | 3.07× |
Screen Arcvue scenario planner, against the actual debt schedule and the covenant thresholds in the credit agreement. Read this one row by row. The two columns are alternative states of the world, not components of a sum. Basis the debt and covenant figures are the deal page's, and the margin is the one the invoice earns. The scenario borrows nothing it has not already published. Synthetic sample.
The answer is no—3.07× against a 3.50× maximum, with 0.43× of headroom left. That is a materially different conversation from we think we are probably fine. The answer happened to be reassuring. The same machinery would have told you if it were not.
Four more places the same data removes a wait, and none of them is a new system.
The scenario at III is one use of a nightly close. The others are the ordinary work of an FP&A function, and what they have in common is that none of them requires anybody to assemble anything first.
| The work | What it runs on | What it replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing a bid | The filed provisional rates, watched against what the pools actually produce | Last quarter's estimate, typed into a copy of a spreadsheet |
| Annual budgeting | Division leads entering against their own history, rolling up automatically | Weeks of emailed templates and manual consolidation |
| Cash position | Eight weeks back and thirteen forward, anchored on the bank balance | A spreadsheet maintained beside the ERP |
| Pipeline coverage | Measured against the growth target, by division, year by year | A pipeline report that says what is in it, not whether it is enough |
Screen Arcvue, the same nightly close behind every row. Read this one row by row. Four independent kinds of work, not components of a total. Basis the point of the middle column is that it says the same thing four times. These are not four products. Synthetic sample.
Which is the argument for buying one thing rather than four. A pricing tool, a budgeting tool, a cash tool, and a pipeline tool would each need the same data and would each maintain their own copy of it—and the copies would disagree, at which point somebody has to reconcile them. The reconciliation is the cost, and it is the cost nobody quotes. Arcvue is the one thing. The four rows above are four readings of a single nightly close, not four products keeping four copies of your data.