Forrester Applauds Microsoft Licensing

The industry analyst group Forrester evaluated the licensing and pricing strategies of leading enterprise applications vendors across 97 criteria and published its findings in “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Apps Software Licensing and Pricing, Q4 2007.”  The report applauded Microsoft’s efforts in both SMB and Enterprise licensing.

Here’s an excerpt:

Extensive efforts at streamlining software and licensing for Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) have paid off. Microsoft has maintained its client-friendly concurrent user license and aligned its packaging and pricing across the Microsoft Dynamics line. Business Ready Licensing, launched in July 2006, eliminates the module and SKU complexity of legacy pricing schemes in favor of a user based licensing approach. The current offer includes three key packages: Business Essentials Edition, Advanced Management Edition, and Advanced Management Enterprise Edition, which correspond, respectively, to good/better/best offers. Partners and customers agree that the new policy has improved simplicity. Microsoft does not offer any usage based models, and relies on partners for all of its direct sales. Microsoft earned the top slot in the SMB edition, and is among the top three in the large enterprise edition, of the survey due to extensive support for provisions in the LBoR. (Licensee Bill of Rights.)

Contractor Must Take Responsibility for Oversight

Ken Bricker, Senior Partner for the Government Contractor Services Group at Goodman & Company, sent us an interesting article that talks about the prime contractor’s responsibility for contract oversight. The key points are that in the case of Prime and Subcontract relationships where no government agency has audit cognizance through privity on other contracts, the Prime is responsible for assuring:

• That the subcontractor has an accounting system adequate for accumulating costs under the contract types awarded.
• That the costs proposed are current, accurate and complete as well as reported in accordance with FAR Part 31.
• That the costs incurred (cost reimbursable contracts) are allowable, allocable and reasonable in accordance with FAR Part 31.

Says Bricker, a contractor’s goal should always be to assure they are administering, (which includes estimating, accumulating and reporting costs) within the guidelines of the FAR and in compliance with all of their contracts.  While the Procuring Contracting Officer (PCO) is responsible for the content of a given contract, typically an Administrative Contracting Officer (ACO) is assigned responsibility for a contractor and the administration of any contracts they may hold.   Accordingly, if the cognizant agency is the Department of Defense (DoD), the Defense Contract Management Agency should act as the Contract Administration Office (CAO).  The assigned ACO is then responsible for assuring that the contractor meets their obligations to have an adequate accounting system and that the contractor provides timely incurred cost submissions to the cognizant auditor as well as many other administrative functions required by the FAR and likely included in the contracts.

Click here for the complete article.

Contractors Moving from QuickBooks and GCS Premier to NAV

We are very excited to see the growing number of high-growth government contractors that have moved to Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Government Contractors from PVBS. Many of these companies have graduated from a basic entry-level accounting application with limited functionality, such as QuickBooks, and needed a more feature-rich, intuitive solution. Others have moved from older, inflexible legacy programs such as Deltek GCS Premier. And others were looking for a great Microsoft solution and found it with Dynamics NAV.

We’re particularly excited about two of our customers that have had a great deal of success moving to Dynamics NAV from less functional programs. EMW (Herndon, VA, www.emw.com) and Dovèl Technologies (McLean, VA, www.doveltech.com) have been servicing many Defense, Civilian, and Intelligence agencies for years. We published case studies on both companies on our web site this month.

The EMW case study represents something we frequently see, which is the need for DCAA compliance. EMW expected to start winning a large number of contracts around the world to service the Federal Government and wanted to ensure that the financial systems were well established in advance of the expected DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) audits on their cost-plus and other contracts. The EMW COO said, “We can see how Dynamics NAV lets us do more with less.”

Dovel leadership knew that the growing company had well exceeded the capabilities of QuickBooks. They needed an accounting solution that the DCAA would approve and were convinced that DCAA would not approve their usage of QuickBooks, an accounting software solution that was not designed to meet the needs of government contractors least of all ones that were growing quickly. QuickBooks was enough to get the company started but once it started winning Federal Government business, it quickly became a liability that threatened the company’s growth.