Budget and Provisional Rate Development

Gain Insights and Competitive Advantage

ICAT’s Budget Development feature gives you a powerful tool to support strategic planning, pricing analysis, cost proposals, and provisional rate development.

Government contractors using QuickBooks need a budgeting function with industry-specific capabilities. A well-developed budget helps management quantify the indirect costs that must be recovered with contract revenues during the budget period. Budgets also help contractors schedule out hours and plan resources. ICAT enables contractors to project direct and indirect contract costs, and evaluate the impact of new proposals on the business's indirect rates and financial plan.

ICAT Budgets equips government contractors with tools to budget current and planned jobs, evaluate scenarios with new business, develop provisional rates, and track the overall financial performance of the business throughout the year.

Enhanced Budgeting and Reporting with ICAT

ICAT’s budget function was designed to give government contractors a flexible framework for developing granular budgets and determining provisional indirect rates.

Plan for the Future

Map out a financial blueprint for future periods:

• Import cost data directly from QuickBooks as a basis for budgeting the new year
• Assign an escalation rate to prior year costs, or modify specific costs by unique conditions or timeframe
• Identify labor costs at the individual level, including PTO, benefits and bonuses
• Assign direct labor and costs to contracts
• Project indirect costs
• Include/exclude proposal data to evaluate the impact of new work on indirect rates

Develop Provisional Billing Rates

Establish budgetary support for your Provisional Indirect Rate Proposal:

• Calculate provisional indirect rates from budgeted costs instead of defaulting to outdated rates
• Quantify changes that will impact indirect rates
• View cost pool detail and cost allocations for future periods

Run Budget-based Reports

Gain insights throughout the year:

• View budget vs. actual reports
• Analyze labor ultilization and costs by individual employee/position
• View remaining contract hours and amounts month-to-month
• Track your burn schedule throughout the year
• Generate an organizational chart from personnel data

ICAT allows you to build out unlimited budget scenarios. Copy existing budgets and incorporate new information to update forecasts, or evaluate alternative scenarios side-by-side.

The Benefits of Budgeting

Contract-focused budgeting enables businesses to classify direct costs by contract and indirect costs by cost pools, plan personnel costs, calculate Provisional Indirect Rates from budgeted costs, and assess the impact of new work on indirect rates. Through the budget process, management must make reasonable assumptions regarding the volume of business to be performed, expansion of facilities, as well as the rising costs of items such as rents, health care benefits, and general inflation.

Once a budget is produced, management will have a tool to:

• Quantify the indirect costs that must be recovered with contract revenues during the budget period
• Evaluate the sufficiency of the company’s existing backlog of work
• Make estimates for new work that will be awarded
• Develop and submit a Provisional Indirect Rate Proposal
• Monitor the profitability of contracts