Project health depends on more than customer satisfaction and technical performance. Government contractors also need healthy margins, efficient reporting, reliable billing support, and clear contract closeout documentation. Strong alignment between the project structure and the Contract Line Item Number (CLIN) structure improves reporting, visibility into key metrics such as remaining funding, billing support, and contract closeout effectiveness. These elements help support audit readiness and more efficient project management processes.
Project managers sit at an important intersection between the customer and the business. They are often the first line for addressing customer questions and concerns, while also reporting to business leadership and accounting on the project’s financial health. Aligning the project manager’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for managing customer requirements and project progress with the contract’s CLIN structure gives project managers, accounting teams, contracts teams, and business leaders more useful visibility throughout the life of the project.
Understanding the Role of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in Unanet
Within Unanet, the WBS or tasks can be used in several ways to improve efficiency and clarity. First, the project manager can control the WBS elements that allow for labor or ODC entry, or both. Budgets are integrated at each level of the WBS, allowing actuals to be tracked directly to their budgets. In addition to managing the budget, the Unanet WBS also allows the project manager to track completed items, create dependencies and define start and finish dates to build a critical path and visualize the progression through the WBS steps in a Gantt chart. These features help the project manager run their projects more effectively and see the impact of ongoing work in real time.
Understanding the Role of CLIN Structure
The CLIN structure of the contract affects customer invoicing, funding, reporting requirements, and performance tracking. All Unanet clients configure their projects differently, depending on the combined needs of the CLIN and WBS structures. Aligning the CLIN and WBS structures supports oversight, execution, invoicing, reporting, and the needs of both project management and accounting.
Where WBS and CLIN Misalignment Creates Problems
In my experience working with Unanet customers, I have found that those who don’t account for all these considerations when setting up projects will run into complications. I often see that the CLINs for the accounting team and the contracts team are set up and managed in Unanet without a WBS or other delivery-related items in the system. Project managers then rely on spreadsheets, often having to cross-reference time and expense data to align them, wasting time that could be spent with the customer. I’ve also seen clients manually create their Invoices in spreadsheets to align with CLIN or reporting requirements because those items aren't easily identified in Unanet. Again, this often results in manual work and a slow process of producing customer Invoices, impacting cash flow. Reporting can also be impacted, requiring a lot of manual work at contract closeout to align the recorded values with those in the contract.
Questions Government Contractors Should Ask
There are several items to consider to confirm that your system setup best supports your project managers and accounting team.
- Do the actual costs, including time and ODCs, align easily with the work that is being performed from a WBS perspective? If employees don’t know where to accurately record their labor time, or if there is no direct correlation between the labor and contract requirements, you may need to realign your setup.
- Does your project structure support CLIN-level visibility? If you can’t easily align the labor and ODCs to the CLIN line items, you likely can’t easily determine how you’re doing from a budgetary perspective. Consider realigning the data to streamline reporting.
- Is anyone having to do manual work to create reports, customer invoices, or other documents? If so, you likely need to realign your WBS and CLIN structures within your systems to support better reporting and alignment.
What Better Alignment Looks Like
Once you’ve updated your structure to align your CLINs and WBS to the contract and project requirements, you’ll likely find more efficiencies for everyone. If the WBS aligns with both the project managers' operational management and the accounting team's reporting and billing, both teams will have more time to manage client needs. Fewer adjustments to obtain the correct actuals for reporting and billing result in cleaner records for auditing. Management can run reports that let them easily understand the project status without having others explain or compile data into a format that meets their expectations. This helps throughout the project execution and contract closeout, resulting in long-term efficiencies.
Practical Steps for Stronger Project Setup
To support your organization and move toward better alignment, consider a few items for the next contract and projects you set up in Unanet. Thoroughly review the contract, and include the accounting team, contract managers, and the project manager in this review. Clarify what needs to be tracked for billing, reporting and project execution. Also consider what your business leaders need for oversight reporting. Try to avoid overly simplistic or overly complicated structures, focusing on the most significant needs and the balance required for each team. As the project moves forward, continue analyzing the structure to ensure alignment with the client's ongoing needs. Allow the project managers, accounting and contracting teams to discuss together any changes requested by the customer, so all parties can understand the changes and their impacts on their reporting and prevent issues that may arise from them.
Building a Structure That Supports Long-Term Use
The project setup is one of the most critical elements for successful adoption and use of the Unanet system. Aligning WBS and contract requirements to the project and task structure requires consideration from both a system perspective and a cross-functional business perspective. Accounting, contracts, and project management teams all rely on the structure to support billing, reporting, funding visibility, and contract management. When these elements are set up properly, Unanet can better support the billing and contract rules contractors need to manage. Investing time in structuring projects correctly can improve reporting, strengthen audit readiness, and deliver long-term operational benefits.
Strengthening Project Structure for Contract Compliance
Redstone Government Consulting helps government contractors evaluate whether their Unanet project structure supports contract requirements, CLIN structure, funding visibility, billing expectations, and reporting needs for each award. This includes reviewing how contract requirements are reflected in the project and task structure, how time and expense charges are captured, how billing data is organized, and how project records support contract closeout and audit readiness. Our team of Unanet experts works with accounting, contracts, and project management teams to align WBS design, task setup, charging practices, reporting requirements, and internal review processes. Through Unanet support, process reviews, training, and operational guidance, we help government contractors reduce manual workarounds, improve project visibility, and maintain project data that better supports billing, reporting, and contract administration.
Kristiane Smith serves as a Senior Managing Consultant in Redstone Government Consulting’s Unanet Consulting group, where she supports government contractors in implementing, optimizing, and governing Unanet ERP and CRM environments to strengthen compliance, reporting accuracy, and operational control. With nearly two decades of experience working directly with Unanet customers across implementation, system administration, and enterprise training, Kristiane brings a deep, practical understanding of how system configuration and process design affect audit readiness, billing integrity, and contract performance. Kristiane specializes in translating complex system and business requirements into disciplined, defensible solutions that support compliant project accounting, internal controls, and cross-functional alignment between finance, contracts, HR, and operations. Her background spans full-cycle implementation leadership, enterprise user enablement, and executive advisory support, allowing her to guide clients beyond basic functionality toward sustainable, audit-ready system environments that support the realities of government contracting. At Redstone GCI, Kristiane works closely with government contractors to implement and optimize Unanet ERP and CRM environments that support compliant financial operations, accurate reporting, and effective project execution. She provides hands-on consulting across discovery, configuration, data migration, testing, training, and post-implementation optimization, partnering with finance leaders, contracts teams, project managers, and executive stakeholders to ensure systems align with regulatory expectations and operational goals. Prior to joining Redstone GCI, Kristiane held senior consulting and leadership roles delivering Unanet solutions in regulated environments. She led full-cycle implementations and advised organizations on system design that strengthened project accounting, billing integrity, and internal control maturity. Her experience includes direct operational system ownership as an ERP and business operations lead, where she served as Unanet ERP and AIM system administrator. In that role, she oversaw security and configuration governance, improved cross-functional workflows across accounting, HR, procurement, and project management, and supported leadership with system-based reporting aligned to DCAA expectations. Earlier in her career, Kristiane spent more than a decade at Unanet in progressive leadership roles, including Principal Sales Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, and Director of Unanet University. As Director of Unanet University, she led the strategic development of enterprise training and certification programs for customers, partners, and internal teams. She implemented scalable learning platforms and built structured curricula focused on system configuration, compliance-aligned workflows, and best practices for finance and operations teams, helping standardize how organizations adopted and governed the Unanet platform. Across her career, Kristiane has supported Unanet implementations for organizations ranging from small professional services firms to large government contractors. Her experience includes designing and supporting integrations with platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics SL, QuickBooks, Sage, and MAS products, as well as providing business process consulting across project cost accounting, budgeting and forecasting, invoicing, contracts management, earned value management, and expense management. This combination of consulting leadership, operational system ownership, and enterprise training experience enables her to bridge technical configuration with real-world execution. At Redstone GCI, Kristiane applies this depth of experience to help Unanet clients build systems and processes that are not only efficient, but compliant, auditable, and aligned with the operational demands of government contracting.