Government contractors using QuickBooks have to go outside the system to satsify cost accounting and reporting requirements that come with Federal Contracts. But manually tracking contract costs and indirect rates in spreadsheets is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. You need accurate, timely data to manage contract costs, prepare cost proposals, and run your business.
ICAT (short for Indirect Cost Allocation Tool) is an accounting and reporting tool for QuickBooks that gives you instant access to the financial reports necessary for government contracting with the ease of opening a spreadsheet. ICAT enables you to seamlessly support FAR & DFARS accounting compliance requirements through the life of the contract with QuickBooks as your accounting system backbone.
Customize Your Indirect Rate Structure
ICAT's Rate Model Editor enables you to map cost pools and allocation bases according to your company's indirect cost allocation policy. You can choose from included templates, or customize an indirect rate structure to fit your unique needs.
ICAT reads your QuickBooks chart of accounts and recognizes any cost of goods sold and expense type account at the parent/root level as a cost pool. For each indirect cost pool, your pool and base components are defined from your accounts in QuickBooks and allocations from other cost pools. ICAT also supports intermediate allocations to other cost pools.
Seamlessly Calculate Your Rates
Based on the resulting indirect rate model configuration, ICAT automatically calculates your indirect rates and allocates indirect costs to final cost objectives from your QuickBooks general ledger data. You can seamlessly view total costs – direct & indirect – by job, track contract status versus funding limitations, monitor indirect rate variances, and more from your current QuickBooks data. No data export or synch is required.
Effortless Job Cost Accounting
A fundamental requirement of Federal Contract cost accounting is the ability to charge direct costs and allocate indirect costs to the appropriate final cost objective. Your contracts, CLINs, or other unique identifiers for each final cost objective are set up in the QuickBooks Customer Center.
ICAT pulls in the job listing from your QuickBooks Customer Center so you can enter additional information specific to government contracts such as contract type, inception date, funded amount, and contract value. These details enable ICAT to generate accurate contract status reports and your Incurred Cost Proposal.
User-Friendly Reports Designed for Government Contracting
With seamless reporting from your QuickBooks general ledger data, you gain essential financial insights to manage contracts and the business, and ensure compliance.
Once your indirect rate model and contracts are defined in ICAT, you can quickly see direct and indirect costs in real-time, for any timeframe. View indirect rate calculations and allocations, run a P&L by job that includes indirect cost allocations, track job status over the life of the contract, and more. Click here to see ICAT's reporting capabilities.
You can also generate your Incurred Cost Proposal with cost data from QuickBooks automatically populated into the appropriate schedules. You'll save a hours of work and simplify this tedious annual report.
Flexible & Scalable
We believe businesses deserve the flexibility to choose hosting, timekeeping, and payroll tools that work for your business and budget, as well as the ability to scale functionality as your needs grow.
Take timekeeping for example. You have the flexibility to choose a DCAA-compliant timekeeping application that fits your budget and requirements. Your time data is an input into QuickBooks. ICAT reads your time data from QuickBooks, but does not directly connect to your timekeeping software. Certain time data elements must be imported into QuickBooks to use ICAT's labor distribution reporting features.
With three ICAT editions available, you can upgrade your subscription to add features as your needs (and contract requirements) grow.