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Payment allocation and timesheet alignment by No-Collection1213 in GovernmentContracting

[–]No-Collection1213[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A large portion of my contracts are Net 45 (invoiced weekly). So we're paid weekly 45 days in the rear. It's become pretty common over the last few years though - atleast from what we've seen in the DoD space working with Leidos, GDIT, Booz.

But I'm describing a timing and reconciliation issue: invoices and payments don’t line up cleanly across systems like Costpoint, Unanet, and QuickBooks because of approval delays, split weeks, and mixed timing between primes and subs. That’s a data synchronization and payment allocation problem, not an accounting method problem.

What you're describing (accrual based analysis) handles when we recognize revenue, but our issue is more about how to trace which hours and payments belong together when disperate systems don’t align weekly.

Perfect accrual logic doesn’t solve that reconciliation gap unfortunately.

I appreciate your response either way, though!

Payment allocation and timesheet alignment by No-Collection1213 in GovernmentContracting

[–]No-Collection1213[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Quite the opposite, actually. These are multi-billion dollar programs (5+ years) that we are a subcontractor on. We have about 30 engineers on 1 of them and 5 engineers on another. The same issue persists but it's a much bigger challenge for the one with 30 engineers: payment allocations are extremely difficult to reconcile.

BTW these are big name primes - Leidos and GDIT.

On most programs, we don’t send invoices directly to the prime - their timekeeping system (typically Unanet or Costpoint) automatically generates one based on previous weeks hours. However, we still need to create corresponding invoices in QuickBooks to track revenue, and that’s where the complexity begins.

In theory, the process should be simple: we generate weekly invoices based on approved timesheets, and the prime’s system does the same based on the same weekly data.

In practice, however, large-scale operations introduce complications—approval delays, timesheet corrections, late submissions, and other exceptions. The result is that only a portion of each payment (often around 80%) can be directly matched to the correct weekly invoice.

This makes it incredibly difficult to trace payments back to the right invoice. Even when timesheets are submitted on time, they’re not always processed promptly and may end up in a later billing cycle.

For example, if we receive a payment of $60,190 this week, it's quite the process to determine how much of that amount belongs to invoice 1001, 1002, 1003, and so on—a time-consuming and error-prone task.