Adam spent 20 minutes looking for a $36 receipt. His finance team sent three Slack messages. Someone made a sticky note.

Ramp would have matched it automatically the moment he swiped. Auto-coded, in-policy, synced. Nobody had to ask Adam for anything.

This is what finance looks like when it runs itself.

Your team can be Adam. Or they can not be Adam.

Don’t be like Adam

Hey, it's Michael.

Quick one this week, but it's the habit that separates the finance teams that sleep at night from the ones scrambling every December.

Here's the setup: you bill the government using provisional indirect rates — your best estimate at the start of the year. Your books, meanwhile, produce actual rates every month. Those two numbers are never identical. In January the gap is tiny. Nobody notices.

But the gap compounds. A hire here, a lost contract there, a rent increase — each one nudges your actuals away from what you're billing. By Q3 it isn't rounding error anymore. And if you only look at year-end, you find out one of two ways, both bad: you've been under-billing and left money on the table you'll never get back, or you've been over-billing and now you owe the government a check.

The fix costs 90 minutes a month.

After every close, put your provisional rates next to your actual rates. Three lines each — fringe, overhead, G&A. Look at the variance. If it's inside a couple of points, do nothing. If it's drifting, write down why in one sentence — "added two indirect heads in May" — and decide: one-month blip, or a trend?

That's the whole discipline. Your indirect rates are a thermostat, not a smoke alarm — you want the small, boring adjustment in June, not the emergency in December.

The teams that do this are never surprised by their own numbers. The teams that don't spend January explaining to their boss why the company owes money nobody saw coming.

Ninety minutes. Once a month. Cheapest insurance in GovCon finance.

— Michael

P.S. — If you want the provisional-vs-actual tracker I use for this, it's one of the three sheets in the GovCon Controller's Toolkit. But honestly? You can build a version in a spreadsheet in an afternoon. The discipline matters more than the tool.