Your books are clean and the program is still bleeding.
Those are two different problems, and your accounting firm only solves the first one. An incurred cost submission that sails through and a program quietly burning eight points of fee are entirely compatible.
The firms that do earned value properly are built for primes — they price for a $500M program with an eighteen-month validation runway. The firms that do government accounting are built for the CFO's compliance calendar. Between them sits a sixty-person company that just took a contract with EVM flowed down onto it and has no idea what it signed up for.
Fixed fee. Named deliverable. Defined end date.
Every engagement below is scoped to a specific deliverable and a finish date, quoted as a fixed fee before any work starts. No hourly billing and no open-ended retainer — you approve the number and the date together, in writing, before I begin.
Program Financial Readiness Review
Where you actually stand against what's been flowed down. Your accounting system against the SF 1408 criteria, your indirect rate structure and pool logic, your EAC process, and whether your systems can produce what the CDRLs ask for. Findings memo, gap register, prioritized twelve-month roadmap, ninety-minute readout.
Program Baseline & EAC Build
Control account structure, a time-phased performance baseline, a documented EAC methodology with three scenarios, variance thresholds and formats, and a monthly cadence your program managers can actually run. Built to survive the questions DCMA actually asks: EIA-748-D Guideline 27, Maintain Estimates at Completion, is one of sixteen high-risk guidelines where a material weakness triggers system disapproval under DFARS 234.201(7)(ii) as deviated, and one of three — with 6 and 10 — accounting for 30% of all EVMS corrective action requests in DCMA’s 2020–2024 CAR data. Under EIA-748-E it becomes Guidelines 20 and 23.
Indirect Rate Structure Build
Pool and base design, a FAR Part 31 unallowable cost scrub, the rate model, your provisional billing rate package, and a forward pricing rate proposal. If your structure was set when you had twelve people and you now have sixty, it is costing you recovery on every invoice.
SF 1408 Pre-Award Readiness
For when a contracting officer has told you an accounting system determination is coming and the survey date is weeks out, not months. FAR 16.301-3 lets them award cost-reimbursement only if your system is adequate. All fifteen SF 1408 criteria — direct and indirect segregation, cost accumulation by contract, indirect allocation methodology, general ledger control, timekeeping and labor distribution, interim determinations, unallowables — and item 5, whether the system is in full operation, which is the most common single point of failure.
CSDR / FlexFile Submission
If you have been named in a prime’s CSDR plan under DFARS 252.234-7004 Alternate I, you owe a FlexFile regardless of your own contract value — and there is almost nowhere public to turn. CDRL and reporting plan interpretation, WBS-to-report mapping, cPet setup and validation, submission through CADE’s CSDR Submit-Review, and a documented process so the next one is yours.
Program Finance Review — monthly.
Most engagements start as a project. The ones that continue become a standing monthly review, because programs report monthly and the discipline only works if someone is actually looking.
Monthly review cycle
Your team produces the EAC. I review it — variance against the baseline, whether the estimate still holds, and what it means for fee. Indirect rate actuals against provisionals, flagged before they become a year-end problem. A written memo each month you can hand to your board or your prime. Quarterly forward-pricing refresh. On call for contracting officer, DCMA and DCAA questions in between.
I take three of these at a time, and no more. Every program in the country closes in the same five business days, so a fourth would mean missing someone's date. When the three are full the answer is a waitlist, not a thinner version of the work.
This is a review retainer, not an outsourced back office. I don't run your books — firms like ReliAscent and AccountingDepartment.com do that well, and cheaper than I could. Your controller keeps the pen. I am the second set of eyes that catches the overrun in month four instead of month nine.
Projects that end.
- Projects end; the review renews by choice. Every project has a defined scope and a finish date. The monthly review runs on a rolling twelve months with sixty days notice either way — you are never locked into a subscription for something you should own.
- You own it when I leave. Each engagement closes with a documented runbook and someone on your team trained to run it. If the monthly review ends, nothing breaks — your team was always holding the pen.
- I do the work. No junior analyst behind me, no bench to hand you off to. The person on the call is the person building the model.
- Deadlines, not hours. Your submission is due on the sixteenth business day. You will have it on the twelfth.
- Half at signature, half at delivery. No change orders unless you change the scope.
Program finance, from inside the seat.
I build EACs, maintain indirect rate structures, and file DoD cost data reports as my actual job — this month, on current systems, against the rules as they are now. When EIA-748 went to Revision E in February and the EVMS thresholds moved on 1 February 2026, I didn’t read about it. I worked through it.
I am not the deepest bench in govcon. Redstone GCI and Capital Edge have done this hundreds of times and they are good at it — if you need a full EVMS validation with legal exposure attached, hire them. What I offer is narrower and closer: current, hands-on program finance at a company whose problems look like yours, from someone in El Segundo who can be at your table tomorrow. Every firm in this field is in Huntsville or northern Virginia.
Conflicts, confidentiality, and availability.
Availability. Engagements are scoped to a committed delivery date, and that date is in the agreement. You get scheduled working sessions, not "whenever I'm free." If I can't commit to your date, I tell you before you sign rather than after.
Conflicts. I hold a full-time position in the defense industry — which is exactly why the experience is current, and why conflicts get handled in writing up front. I run a documented conflict check before every engagement, against the standards in FAR 3.101-1 and the Procurement Integrity Act. I don't take work involving companies competing with or supplying my employer on named programs, or anything touching a pursuit I have visibility into. If a conflict emerges mid-engagement, I tell you and we stop.
Your data. An NDA is signed before anything moves. Your cost structure, rates and program data stay in your systems wherever possible, and nothing you share is ever discussed inside my employer. You should expect all of this from anyone in this position; most won't volunteer it.