Aerospace and defense — Defense primes and subcontractors
CAS-covered contracts, incurred cost submissions, and a rate structure that must survive a DCAA audit.
On a commercial part, price is what the customer will pay. On a cost-type or CAS-covered contract, price is a structure — pools, bases, allowability rules and a disclosure statement — and it is the structure the government audits rather than the number. Manufacturers arrive at this from the shop floor, where nobody was ever asked to explain why the material handling pool is allocated the way it is.
indirect pool and base
provisional billing rate
incurred cost submission
wrap rate
unallowable cost
progress payment liquidation
government furnished property
disclosure statement
forward pricing rate agreement
These are the terms the review uses with you. A page written for
an aerospace and defense manufacturer generally would not contain any of them.
Where it concentrates here
Specific to defense primes and subcontractors, not to an aerospace and defense manufacturer generally. Each is
concentrated — a single agreement, a single code, a single account nobody reviews
— which is why a sample of the operation tends to miss it and a full pass tends to
find it. They are not findings from a named engagement.
A material handling or subcontract management pool allocated on a base that made sense when the mix was different, so a program heavy in buy rather than make carries indirect cost it did not generate.
Government furnished property and customer-owned tooling on the shop floor without the accountability record the contract requires, discovered when a property audit asks for it.
Progress payments drawn against costs the accounting system cannot cleanly separate by contract, so the liquidation is defensible only until someone examines it.
Unallowable costs screened at year end rather than at the point of entry — some categories are unmistakable, others are a judgment made in the ledger — leaving a year of entries to reconstruct from memory.
Provisional billing rates left unchanged through a year in which the base moved, so the true-up arrives at the incurred cost submission as a repayment or as fee nobody had forecast.
Where this data actually lives
Deltek Costpoint in the established contractors; Unanet GovCon, JAMIS Prime or PROCAS below that, and a job-cost layer on QuickBooks at the small end
A timekeeping product with a daily audit trail, because labor is the account an auditor opens first
PIEE/WAWF for invoicing and receiving reports, and SPRS for the score a prime reads before the scorecard
Item unique identification and property records kept in the quality system rather than the ERP, so property and cost never reconcile
Named because it changes what the intake asks
for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them
rather than surprised by them.
The proposal is written for an aerospace and defense manufacturer as a
whole — the sequence, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your
number of operating units. What is on this page is what we would additionally expect to
find in defense primes and subcontractors.