BigTime offers professional service firms that work with the government an easy and comprehensive way to log and review time and maintain an audit trail for DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) compliance.
Once your firm is DCAA enabled, you can take advantage of these tools. Here is an overview of how these features work.
DCAA Timekeeping Features
BigTime presents a process for staffers to enter time, log notes, and sign off on this information on a daily basis to meet necessary DCAA timekeeping requirements.
Whether staffers log time through the web app or iPhone mobile app, the system will prompt them to add notes for auditing purposes.
Staffers will be able to add time for the active day and for prior days, noting an explanation for why these changes were made, but they will not be permitted to enter time for any billable work on future dates. They can also choose between a weekly or daily view of their timesheets, and switch between the two—as many users do.
See these articles for more information on the settings in place behind the scenes for DCAA timekeeping, and the process for logging time and audit notes:
Submitting and Printing Verified Timesheets
You might find it useful to set a timesheet submission deadline based on your firm’s payroll schedule. You can set the submission period and even lock timesheet entry beyond this period.
Whatever you decide, once staffers are ready to submit their timesheets they will be asked to verify their submission with an electronic signature. This electronic signature will simply be their name and BigTime password.
Once verified time and audit notes are submitted, users can choose to print those submissions. Managers can also do this for any of their staffers.
Reviewing and Approving Timesheets and Audit Logs
You can enable review notifications for managers when timesheets and audit notes are submitted by staffers. Managers have the flexibility of approving whole timesheets or approving time entries one at a time or in bulk.
Managers can view and edit notes, send submissions back to staffers for corrections, and then approve entries with their own electronic signatures. When managers approve entries, they will be approving user-verified time and notes and any corrections made. This signature will then be combined with all of this data and available from the Report Center in BigTime for necessary DCAA audit trail reporting.
For more on the review and approval process, see DCAA Timesheet Review and Approval.
DCAA Audit Reporting
A considerable benefit of DCAA timekeeping features in BigTime is that everything is available from one place. From the Report Center, managers and admins can print a weekly timesheet report that details all time entries, audit log information, and digital signatures. Managers can set the time frame for the report and even select to pull data for just a specific user within a given period.
This is a report that could be submitted to payroll and be printed and available when it’s time for a DCAA audit. Read DCAA Timesheet Audit Trail Reporting for more information on audit reporting in BigTime.