Deltek and Unanet Alternatives for Small Contractors
Somebody has told you that you need an ERP. Here is what the Deltek and Unanet alternatives actually are, what Costpoint and Unanet genuinely do better, when a lighter stack is enough for DCAA, and the one question that separates the two situations.
A consultant tells you that you need Deltek. Or a prime you have just subcontracted to mentions in passing that everyone on the program runs Costpoint, and your accounting is a QuickBooks file that has worked fine for six years, and the award you spent nine months chasing suddenly looks like it arrives with a software project attached to it.
Sometimes that advice is exactly right. It is also given far more often than it is true, usually by people whose experience is with contractors several times your size. Taking it when you did not need to costs you months of your finance team’s attention, not just license fees.
The question is narrower than “which system should we buy”, and once you have answered it the shopping takes about a week.
The short version
- An ERP is an accounting system with timekeeping inside it. A timekeeping tool is a system of record for hours that feeds accounting you already have. Buying one when you needed the other is the expensive mistake.
- No regulation names any software. DCAA does not certify or approve products, and the FAR does not list vendors. What gets tested is your records and your process.
- Unanet’s own buyer’s guide puts a mid-sized GovCon ERP implementation at three to six months.
- An ERP genuinely does things a timekeeping tool does not, including indirect rate calculation and the incurred cost submission. Those are accounting functions, and the question is whether your accounting is what is actually broken.
- Neither Deltek nor Unanet publishes a price, and Unanet’s pricing URL returns a 404. Budget for a sales process before you budget for the software.
Why does everybody tell you to buy Deltek?
Almost always it came from your accountant or from a prime, and those two mean quite different things.
Outsourced GovCon accounting firms tend to standardize on one platform and bring their clients onto it, which is efficient for them and frequently good for the client too. PROCAS, a smaller competitor in this space, runs a public directory of seventeen named CPA and outsourced-accounting partners, and that channel is the whole engine of the business. So when your accountant recommends a system, you are often hearing which system your accountant already knows well.
A prime is a different case. A prime mentioning Costpoint is telling you what they run. When a program office asks whether your accounting system is adequate, that question has nothing to do with brand names. What it means is covered in our guide to the SF 1408 preaward accounting system review, and the short version is that adequacy is about structure, not about a logo.
The thing to hold onto through the rest of this
DCAA does not certify, approve or endorse any software product. There is no approved list. An auditor tests whether your records show what was worked on, by whom, against which cost objective, and whether corrections kept their history. Software makes producing that evidence easy or hard. It never makes you compliant on its own.
Covered in full in our DCAA timekeeping requirements guide
What is a GovCon ERP, against what a timesheet tool is?
These are two different purchases and the words get used interchangeably, which is most of why the decision feels harder than it is.
Deltek Costpoint and Unanet are accounting systems, and your general ledger lives inside them along with your chart of accounts, your contract structure and your indirect cost pools. Timekeeping is one module among many, so buying one means migrating your books.
A DCAA-capable timekeeping tool is the system of record for hours. It holds who worked, on what, against which cost objective, with the correction history and approvals attached, and it hands clean totals to whatever accounting system you already run. Buying one leaves your books where they are.
| GovCon ERP | Timekeeping layer | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Your accounting system, with timekeeping as a module | Your system of record for hours, feeding accounting you already own |
| What you migrate | The general ledger, chart of accounts, contract structure, historical data | Employees, projects and cost objectives |
| Who runs the project | Finance, with outside implementation help | Whoever already administers your timesheets |
| Typical timeline | Three to six months for mid-sized contractors, per Unanet’s own guide | Days to a few weeks |
| What it fixes | Accounting that cannot hold contracts, pools and rates | Hours that are unreliable, unevidenced or trapped in spreadsheets |
The distinction matters most when the two get conflated into a single budget line. A firm whose books close cleanly every month and whose timesheets still arrive by email on Friday afternoon has one problem, and it is not the ledger.
What does an ERP genuinely do better?
This part matters, because a comparison that will not concede anything is one you should not trust.
An ERP calculates your indirect rates. It holds the pool and base structures behind them and tracks provisional rates against actuals through the year. That apparatus is what turns raw cost into a billing rate you can defend. Doing that outside an ERP means somebody maintaining a serious spreadsheet, and our employee cost calculator will show you the shape of a fully burdened rate if you have never had to build one.
The incurred cost submission is the other one. That annual reconciliation of what you spent against what you billed runs to a set of linked schedules. A system already holding the ledger, the contracts and the pools can assemble most of them. That is a real difference and it grows with the number of cost-reimbursement awards you hold.
Contract-level revenue recognition, funding ceilings and limitation-of-funds tracking are native to it as well, rather than a report somebody rebuilds each month.
Every one of those is an accounting function. So the honest framing is not that an ERP is oversized, because for plenty of contractors it is exactly the right size. It is that all of its advantages sit downstream of your ledger, which makes the deciding question a question about your ledger.
Which thing is actually broken, your accounting or your hours?
Almost every reader arriving at this page can be sorted by one honest look at where the pain is.
Signs your accounting is the problem
You are computing indirect rates in a spreadsheet that one person understands. Your accounting system cannot hold a contract, task order and CLIN structure without workarounds. You have an incurred cost submission due and no idea how to build the schedules. In these situations an ERP is a real answer and you should go and buy one.
Signs your hours are the problem
Your books close cleanly every month, but timesheets arrive on Friday in a spreadsheet, corrections are made by overwriting cells, and nobody could prove who entered what. This is a timekeeping problem wearing an accounting problem’s clothes, and replacing your general ledger will not touch it.
Signs the advice came from somewhere else
Nobody has looked at your books. The recommendation arrived from a prime describing their own stack, or from an accountant describing theirs. That advice may still be correct. Ask them to point at the specific thing your current setup cannot do, and the answer tells you which of the two situations above you are in.
Contractors under roughly fifty people with a small number of cost-reimbursable awards usually land in the second group. That is not a rule, and it is a useful prior to start from.
Where the product sits, precisely
TimeRewards is the second purchase, not the first. It is the system of record for hours, and one-click DCAA compliance is on every plan including the $9.99 entry tier. Time lands against a named cost objective, every correction keeps the original value with its author, timestamp and stated reason, and approved hours reach your books without anyone retyping them.
The setup is the part to ask about on a call. Most systems in this category expect you to run your process their way. This one is configured around the process you already have. In the company’s own published words, you “Build the approval workflow you need, simple or multi-step, and route each entry to the approvers a contract requires.” Approval steps, notification rules and timesheet policies get shaped to how your firm actually operates, which is why a walkthrough tends to show you more than an hour of reading does.
Configuration depth does scale with the plan. Custom approval routing and branding are on every plan, custom fields start on Professional, and custom integrations sit on Enterprise. The compliance layer is on all three.
Which Deltek and Unanet alternatives fit a small contractor?
The most common of the Deltek alternatives is the one nobody advertises, because it is assembled rather than sold: a mainstream accounting system plus a timekeeping layer built for DCAA.
QuickBooks handles the ledger for a very large number of small contractors and keeps doing so well past the point where people assume it stops. Sage Intacct sits a step up and holds dimensional structures that map onto contracts and tasks cleanly. Either one, paired with timekeeping that produces the evidence an auditor asks for, covers the requirements in our DCAA timekeeping guide without touching your general ledger.
We have written the specifics of both pairings: time tracking for QuickBooks users and DCAA-compliant timekeeping with Sage Intacct. If you want the wider field of timekeeping tools rather than the ERPs, the DCAA-compliant time tracking comparison covers six of them on the things that matter in an audit.
What this stack asks of you is that somebody owns the indirect rate calculation, because no timekeeping tool is going to do it. For a firm with one or two pools that is a quarterly afternoon with an outsourced accountant, and it is the trade that keeps a three-to-six-month implementation off your calendar entirely.
Where does Deltek Replicon fit?
A reader searching for Deltek can land on Replicon rather than Costpoint and come away thinking the category has only one shape to it.
Replicon is a separate Deltek product from Costpoint, announced in February 2024 and sold as standalone time tracking rather than as an ERP. It is FedRAMP Moderate Authorized and listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace, and its product page describes integration with “your existing ERP, CRM, payroll, and project management systems”, naming SAP, ADP, Jira and Deltek’s own Vantagepoint and Costpoint among them.
So it belongs in the same category as a timekeeping layer rather than in the ERP conversation, and a contractor comparing options should have it on the list. It is a serious product and the FedRAMP authorization is a genuine differentiator for anyone whose contract requires it.
Two things shape the comparison. Its price is not published, so evaluating it starts with a sales conversation. And because coexisting with your existing accounting system is something both it and we do, the comparison that will actually decide it is how much of your own process each one bends to accommodate. That is a question for a demo rather than for a feature grid, on either side.
Why can you not find a price for any of them?
Because none of the three publishes one. Deltek Costpoint offers a demo request and no figures. Unanet publishes no per-user price anywhere on its site, and its pricing URL returns a 404. Replicon is quote-based as well.
That is normal for enterprise software and it has a practical consequence you have to plan around. Comparing these options means running a sales process before you can build a budget, and for a finance lead trying to answer “what will this cost us” before a board meeting, that is a real obstacle rather than a minor one.
Ours are published: $9.99, $14.99 and $24.99 per user per month on the pricing page, with a fourteen-day trial that does not ask for a card. You can cost the timekeeping half of this decision this afternoon and spend your sales-process patience on the half that actually needs it.
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Nine questions that decide whether you need an ERP
Answer these before you take a single demo, and take the answers into every one you do take.
0 of 9 confirmed
If the award is recent and none of this is set up yet, what to do after winning a federal contract covers the wider sequence, and who should approve timesheets covers the process question that follows. For the standard itself there is our DCAA compliance overview and the government contractors page, the time card calculator will check hours by hand while you decide, and any unfamiliar term is in the glossary.
Questions people actually ask
No. DCAA does not certify, approve or endorse software, and there is no approved product list. What an audit tests is your records and the process around them: that hours were recorded by the person who worked them, charged to a named cost objective, corrected with the history retained, and approved by a supervisor. Any vendor claiming to be DCAA certified is describing something that does not exist.
Many contractors do. The requirements are about structure and evidence rather than about a single platform. That means direct and indirect costs kept apart, costs accumulated by contract, one consistent basis for allocating overhead, and everything reconciling to the general ledger. A mainstream ledger plus timekeeping built for DCAA meets that, provided somebody owns the indirect rate calculation. Where it gets uncomfortable is when the number of pools grows or an incurred cost submission arrives, which is the point at which the ERP conversation starts to make sense.
Unanet’s own GovCon ERP buyer’s guide states that implementation typically takes three to six months for mid-sized contractors, depending on data complexity, integrations and system design, with smaller organizations moving faster and complex environments taking longer. Treat that as the honest planning figure, since it comes from a vendor with every reason to quote the shortest defensible number. The cost that surprises people is not the license, it is the finance attention the project consumes while it runs.
No. Costpoint is an ERP and holds your general ledger. Replicon is a separate Deltek product, announced in February 2024, sold as standalone time tracking that integrates with the ERP, CRM and payroll systems a customer already runs. It is FedRAMP Moderate Authorized and listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace. If you searched for Deltek and found Replicon, you found a timekeeping product rather than an accounting system, which means it belongs on a different shortlist than Costpoint does.
Ask what specifically they need from you, because it is usually a data or reporting requirement rather than a platform requirement. A prime cannot generally compel a subcontractor’s choice of accounting software, and what a program office asks about is whether your accounting system is adequate, which is an SF 1408 question about structure. If there is a genuine interface requirement, get it in writing and evaluate against that requirement rather than against the brand name.
Mostly time, because none of the ERP options publishes pricing. Deltek Costpoint offers only a demo request, Unanet publishes no per-user figure and its pricing URL returns a 404, and Replicon is quote-based. Budget for several sales conversations before you can build a comparison, and get implementation quoted separately from license, since that is where first-year totals diverge. The timekeeping half you can price immediately, and doing that first often changes the question.
If the gap is your hours, start there
One-click DCAA compliance on every plan, published pricing from $9.99 per user, and a fourteen-day trial that does not ask for a card. Set up around the process you already run, rather than the other way around.