When your accounting or Costpoint subject matter expert leaves, issues start to crop up. Perhaps expense reports are stuck with errors, delaying employee reimbursements. Project designs may not support billing requirements, including the setup of billing formulas and billing formats. Missing or incorrect revenue formulas can cause revenue miscalculations and incorrect information on project reports. Setup issues in your Project Account Groups can affect revenue, billing, and project reporting throughout Costpoint.
Pool maintenance suffers when accounts or organizations are missing from the setup screens. Visibility into the state of the business declines as reporting slows or stops.
Regular Deltek Costpoint processing may be missed, including computing burden and cost pools, creating GL report tables, updating financial statement information, and posting inventory transactions and vouchers.
Costpoint may no longer provide a complete, current view of the business.
How Processing Gaps Accumulate
As these issues accumulate, more processes are done outside of Costpoint, contributing to a backlog of items that need to be entered to get the system accurate again. Entering expense reimbursements directly as accounts payable vouchers can bypass the usual expense approval process and make supporting receipts harder to trace.
Bills without adequate supporting documentation may require correction or additional review, delaying payment. General ledger detail reports and supporting documentation should reconcile to the amounts billed. Bills edited in PDF can create significant issues, as it is easy to introduce math errors, differences in cumulative amounts, incorrect contract value and funding amounts, and outdated headers.
The longer accounts go without reconciliation, the more challenging it becomes to find information about what is in each account as documentation grows stale and the people with the information leave the company.
The impact on the morale of remaining employees grows as they are asked to resolve accumulated issues with little support, no training, and no documentation. They hold things together but feel constantly behind.
Immediate Triage
Catching up is more than just entering a few journal entries, as businesses need to be careful not to exacerbate the issues. Corrective journal entries should be supported by documentation explaining the adjustment and the underlying issue.
First, address any access, credential, or permissions issues.
Next, map out essential processes. Identify what must be completed, when it is due, who depends on it, and who will be responsible.
Correct ongoing processing issues as soon as possible so the backlog does not continue to grow.
Next Steps and Recovery
Next, begin addressing the backlog.
Assign responsibility for saving posting records and relevant documentation in shared folders. Use shared document software such as OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Ensure you have backups of these folders.
Ensure any ongoing projects or true ups are documented in a centrally located, accessible location.
Ensure you have a backup administrator for Costpoint and other financial systems, including banking systems, WAWF, and invoicing portals.
As you go forward, create basic documentation on your processes. Start with documentation your team can maintain, such as a basic month end close checklist and notes on important procedures. Using Zoom or Teams, record a walkthrough of the process, even if just at a high level. The video can be reviewed by future employees who need to understand the process.
Opportunities to Improve
Often, a fresh set of eyes can identify opportunities to streamline a process or eliminate unnecessary steps.
Coming out of this gap shows organizations the value of cross-departmental collaboration and the risks of concentrating essential knowledge and responsibilities in one person.
Personnel navigating this situation often gain a better understanding of Costpoint, finance processes, and the overall system, and efficiencies can be found through the process.
Preparing for Future Staffing Changes
Losing a subject matter expert can be a wake-up call for an organization to make necessary changes. Before that situation arises, consider what documentation, backup responsibilities, and training would help your team maintain essential processes. Costpoint is powerful, but some activities require regular attention. Understanding those responsibilities and planning for staff changes can help reduce disruptions and avoid unnecessary recovery work.
Redstone Government Consulting assists government contractors with maintaining accounting operations and resolving Costpoint issues during staffing changes. Our consultants assist with processing backlogs, account reconciliations, and project, billing, and revenue setup. We also provide temporary or ongoing outsourced accounting support for activities such as invoicing and month end close. Through staff training and documented procedures, we help organizations retain essential knowledge and prepare employees to take on these responsibilities.
Senior Managing Consultant
Shannon is a Senior Managing Consultant in Redstone GCI’s Costpoint Consulting Team. She has used Deltek Costpoint with government contractors for over 10 years. Her experience has covered multiple areas within the system and involved more than the standard day-to-day transactions. She led teams through several system modifications and upgrades, including reorganizations, merging databases and system enhancements.
Shannon is extremely organized and deadline-focused and brought these strengths to her team by utilizing technology to streamline workflows, develop job documentation and use the system to ensure the organization worked smarter, not harder.
She enjoys writing custom reports for her clients and has published many reports that have helped end-users retrieve the data they need in the format they require. Providing automated reports that save them time, improve accuracy and alleviate the need to juggle multiple spreadsheets manually.
Professional Experience
Shannon started her career supporting a large manufacturing company, working in corporate accounting on mark to market accounting for hedge and derivative activities, preparing filings and intercompany eliminations. She then transitioned to an operating group responsible for centralizing all accounting functions for all plants. She was selected for the process improvement team to streamline all templates and close processing.
After obtaining her CPA license, she spent several years working in public accounting preparing individual and trust tax returns. She then entered the world of Deltek Costpoint, working at a not-for-profit. She was responsible for all general ledger and intercompany activities for four entities and creating standardized processes for these areas.
Then, she transitioned to the for-profit world, becoming the director of finance and accounting. She successfully led all financial, DCAA, NASA, and ERISA audits and was instrumental in obtaining a certified accounting system and preparing the annual incurred cost submissions. She also served as the SAAS admin, leading multiple successful Costpoint upgrades and reorganizations. She also functioned as the main report writer for the company – turning ad hoc data requests into repeatable reports that stakeholders could run ad hoc, or have delivered to their inboxes.