DCAA Companion turns QuickBooks into a defensible accounting system for SBIR/STTR contractors. Indirect rates compute themselves. Unallowables get flagged before they reach an invoice. And when an auditor walks in, every number leads back to a transaction — not a spreadsheet rebuilt at 2 a.m.
SBIR awardees know how to build the thing. What they don't always know is how to make QuickBooks tell the truth in the language a Contracting Officer expects to hear it.
Most small defense contractors don't fail audits because they're misappropriating funds. They fail — or get conditional findings — because their books speak commercial-accounting English, and the SF 1408 examiner is asking questions in DCAA dialect.
Direct costs aren't segregated from indirect. Indirect rates can't be reproduced from the general ledger. Timekeeping doesn't trace to labor distribution. Unallowables sit silently inside an account no one screens. When the auditor pulls a sample, half a day disappears into a spreadsheet rebuild that should never have existed.
This product was built around one observation: every gap above is a translation problem, not a discipline problem. Fix the translation — pools, allocation bases, audit trail, FAR-31 screening, traceability — and audits become procedural rather than adversarial.
The ledger you already keep can answer the questions DCAA asks. It just needs a companion that knows the dialect.
Most contractors stitch together five tools. We collapse the workflow into a single audit-traceable line — proposal pricing on the left, contract closeout on the right, every dollar accounted for in between.
Cost-volume pricing built on rates the contractor can actually defend.
SF 1408 readiness check. CO receives an evidence-backed recommendation.
Direct & indirect costs accumulate by contract, with FAR-31 screening on every transaction.
Public-voucher and progress invoices generated from the GL — never recreated in a side spreadsheet.
ICS package, sample-ready trail, and read-only auditor view — handed over in a click.
Stop rebuilding the trial balance every time the Contracting Officer asks for backup. Indirect rates compute themselves. Unallowables get flagged at entry. Your books become defensible without becoming someone else's full-time job.
Manage a portfolio of small contractors from one console. Scoped intake, version-controlled deliverables, and bulk pre-audit packages mean a partner-level workload runs at staff-level effort.
Drill from any number on any schedule down to the source transaction and supporting document. No working-paper detour. No risk of disturbing the contractor's books mid-review. Sample selection in minutes, not days.
An indirect rate is only as defensible as the pool that produced it. The exhibit at right shows a Q3 actual rate calculation as DCAA Companion presents it: pool, base, ratio — line-traceable to the GL accounts on each side of the equation.
No re-typed numbers. No "ask the controller for the spreadsheet." Hover any pool and the underlying transactions appear; click a transaction and the source document follows.
A thirty-day trial on every edition. Connect QuickBooks, import your contracts, and watch the SF 1408 score appear before the coffee gets cold.