Deltek Costpoint: Bringing More Innovation & Automation to the Project Lifecycle

With built-in capabilities to support the way government contractors work, Deltek Costpoint is the industry-leading ERP solution that top contractors trust to help manage cash flow with precision and speed. Costpoint’s core accounting and finance engine provides deep visibility and traceability into costs, drilled down to the project level so you can better align resources, invoice more quickly, and reduce the time it takes to pass an audit by up to 80%.  

But Costpoint’s accounting engine is only a piece of our solution’s robust capabilities.

With industry-specific add-on modules that tie back to project financials, Deltek Costpoint is more than simply an accounting solution. With out-of-the-box modules for CRM and contract management, procurement, and manufacturing, among others, this project-based ERP is built to support government contractors of all sizes as their single solution. Plus, data generated in any of our add-on modules is directly tied back to the project for use in billing, cost estimating and strategic projections.

Costpoint can help improve organizational visibility, maximize employee productivity, and minimize costs across the entire project lifecycle. This is particularly important given the results of 2023 Deltek Clarity Government Contracting Industry Report, which offered an inside look at the current state of the market.

Of the 714 respondents to this year’s Clarity Report, the majority identified rising inflation, limited resources including shrinking headcount, and supply chain issues as three of the top industry challenges. Respondents also noted that solving these challenges would require bringing more innovation and automation to everyday business processes.

Deltek's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions, like Costpoint, are built to streamline and automate your core business operations while breaking down departmental barriers. The latest release of  Deltek Costpoint builds upon our commitment to bringing more innovation to the project lifecycle—from pre-award to contract closeout—to help government contactors automate everyday tasks and deliver successful contracts.

Below, we discuss some of the everyday processes we help streamline through purposeful additions to our project roadmap.

Win More Government Contractors with Integrated Market Intelligence

The ability to win new business is paramount to the success of any government contractor.  Thanks to Costpoint’s seamless integration with GovWin IQ, businesses can identify opportunities pre-solicitation, pursue deals faster, and plan strategically to get ahead of the competition.

By integrating your Costpoint ERP, which centralizes opportunity and contract data across the entire lifecycle, with a market intelligence and opportunity identification software, users can reduce data entry, automate the management and administration of government contracts and provide the contract manager a streamlined solution for managing contracts.

Integrating Costpoint and GovWin IQ also allows your teams to analyze what’s happening throughout the entire capture management process by pulling opportunity information from GovWin IQ and making it available for you to view in Costpoint immediately, while reducing time spent analyzing and reporting. Plus, you’re able to stay up to date on procurement information in real-time thanks to a team of highly skilled research analysts that input any amendments or updates to contracts that your teams need to know about.

By automating the management and administration of government contracts with Costpoint and GovWin IQ, you can better deploy resources to effectively track and win more business.

Planning and Tracking Resources for More Successful Project Delivery

Once you have a pipeline of opportunities or are moving ahead with existing contracts, the next question becomes: Do you have the right resources?

Costpoint is designed to help you plan for future projects and make smarter, fact-based decisions with AI-informed business intelligence capabilities–enabling your users to be more efficient while leveraging new technologies like Smart AI and Intelligent Character Recognition.

Users can also utilize our Professional Services Automation (PSA) capability that helps project teams identify and track billable resource information to improve resource forecasting and utilization, enabling faster billing and visibility into every aspect of project delivery. 

With Costpoint PSA, users have all the information they need in real-time—from opportunity identification through to contract closeout. Our Smart AI provides analytics to help improve resource forecasting and planning, giving users complete visibility into every aspect they need for successful project delivery. We helped further automate the budgeting and planning process with the introduction of navigation banners, UI profiles and the redesign of the project budget entry capability as part of Costpoint 8.2.

But what if you’re working on a project and you realize you need new headcount or additional contractors with specific qualifications?

With our planning capabilities within Costpoint, you can prompt a search for specific resources to ensure you have the right team assembled and the appropriate skills on payroll to deliver a successful project. Based on your search, Costpoint will return a list of available resources or identify where you have gaps.

If you do realize you need additional headcount, our seamless integration with Deltek Talent Management allows you to quickly create a job requisition, which is sent to Talent Management. Once you hire, the new employee information is imported back into Costpoint to be used in your planning and contract management needs, helping you streamline the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process.

Once you have a team assembled, managing labor costs, project timelines and expenditures is also made easier with Costpoint’s comprehensive time and expense tracking capability, which supports more than 2 million users around the globe. Whether you’re in the office or running between project sites, your employees can easily log their time from wherever they are.

And thanks to the newly added interactive emails — which allow managers to send automatic email reminders to their employees, who can then submit time directly from the email reminder — we’re helping to automate and streamline the daily process that every government contractor must do.

Procurement Capabilities for Streamlined S2P Process

For government contractors that need to procure goods and services, leveraging multiple disparate systems, paper, and people to manage the procurement process can increase procurement cycle times, days payable outstanding (DPO), and the time needed to complete a CPSR audit. 

By connecting project data across the entire Source to Pay (S2P) process, you can bring automation, accuracy, and acceleration to the invoicing process while streamlining the contract and subcontract management process.

Source-to-Pay (S2P) is a process that begins with sourcing or seeking out, a supplier of goods or subcontractor of services, negotiating and ultimately contracting with them. The process ends in final payment to the contracted supplier with actionable reporting of data metrics such as supplier score carding and spend analytics.

Costpoint serves as a powerful Source to Pay solution that enables businesses to digitize and streamline the entire procurement process — from vendor selection through purchase order. 

With the ability to collaborate, process payments, and produce compliance reporting, Costpoint gives you everything you need to become a world-class procurement department, all in one place.

Costpoint 8.2 brought further automation to this process with the addition of vendor profile and intelligent character recognition (ICR) for AP automation, which leverages optical character recognition (OCR) technology to convert the contents of an electronic invoice to automatically populate an AP voucher. This streamlines the accounts payable process – reducing manual entry and eliminating the chance for human error.

Utilizing a streamlined S2P solutions helps your teams ensure reporting accuracy and maintaining compliance standards while easing the handoff between teams – all while enabling communication throughout the process.

Optimize Processes for Measurable Business Improvements

Thanks to Costpoint's robust functionality that enables digitization and automation to the entire project lifecycle, your teams can reduce manual processes while providing enhanced tracking and visibility into project and product cost data. And with a digital thread that ties all project financials together, you can work from a single source of truth throughout the project lifecycle while ensuring traceability to government compliance regulations.

Costpoint is designed to support your end-to-end business processes with exclusive integrations to GovWin IQ and Deltek Talent Management – helping you streamline your planning, and Source to Pay processes, among others, so can improve organizational visibility, maximize employee productivity, and minimize costs.