What time-card should my small start-up use for DCAA compliance

September 27, 2012 10:26 AM

Got a Government research contract - now everybody needs to start tracking their time with some kind of DCAA compliant time card system. We're a small 10 person start-up and there's a bewildering range of people and companies offering time tracking solutions. So I'm seeking the hive mind's experience. Should I just use a paper time-cards? If so, where can I find a good template or sample? Should I go with a software or web-based solution? We only have one contract and it encompasses almost everything we do so there's not a lot of complexity tracking multiple proposals. Our business is not to be a government contractor - this project is more in the line of a small business incubator grant.
posted by Long Way To Go to Law & Government (5 answers total)

We're a small company who em is a government contractor, 25ish employees. We went through the wringer on this and eventually went with a Deltek solution, which is the de facto standard. On the major plus side, the DCAA auditors are so familiar with Deltek that you'll float right through an audit. We were audited soon after we set up Deltek and it was easy peasey. On the minus side, it's spectacularly expensive and it's pretty awful software. I wasn't in on the selection/implementation but my understanding is that we were able to cut costs by shopping around for a cheaper vendor (Deltek is provided by "consultants", ugh) and by hosting it ourselves.

We also considered ad hoc solutions (paper/Excel timesheets) and even writing our own DCAA compliant web application (we're software guys) and Deltek was simply the easiest game in town.
posted by mindsound at 11:02 AM on September 27, 2012

My company uses the Dovico software for the same reason as mindsounds, above. Was simple and not really that expensive. We've been audited twice so far and haven't had a problem.
posted by overhauser at 11:11 AM on September 27, 2012

I worked for Unanet for almost 5 years. It's a rock solid DCAA compliant time card solution. You can start just using it with Quickbooks and if you grow into Deltek later you can keep using it.
posted by COD at 11:12 AM on September 27, 2012

I'm self employed, a one-man shop, so this is not directly correlating to your situation: I've been using Tsheets.com for a couple years with good success. Allows detailed time tracking and is relatively easy to set up and use.
posted by ecorrocio at 8:16 PM on September 27, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks everybody, those were all great suggestions. It seems there are hundreds of solutions out there with usability and cost that ranges from cold war grade to web 2.0. After a bunch of research we've decided to go with BeeBole because it integrates into Google Apps and has nice mobile web access, fully hosted and is only about $36 per user per year.
posted by Long Way To Go at 9:28 AM on September 30, 2012