If your GovCon still relies on spreadsheets as primary planning tools, you’re not alone. According to the 2025 GovCon Clarity Report, more than 60 percent of government contractors use manual tools to manage some part of contract management.
Spreadsheets may be your comfort zone, but they create risks: errors multiply, data lives in silos, and leadership lacks the broad visibility to make confident, forward-looking decisions.
The solution is easier and closer at hand than you may think.
Why Forecasting Alignment Matters
Many GovCons treat project and budget forecasting as separate exercises. Yes, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is built to manage projects, but projects do not exist in a vacuum. ERP anticipates the financial implications of project decisions—rates, resources, and funding changes—before the effects ripple across your budget. Without scaling, however, these valuable insights end up siloed in dozens of project-level plans that cannot easily connect into a corporate forecast.
Again, your GovCon is not alone in this challenge. The 2025 GAUGE Report identifies forecasting and resource management as persistent pain points for GovCons. In fact, resource management ranked as the top project management challenge for the fourth consecutive year.
When you scale your ERP system into a broader advanced financial planning and analysis (FP&A) framework, you transform siloed project and budget forecasts into a single, strategic view of your company’s financial performance. You can:
- Unify forecasting across projects, divisions, and the enterprise.
- Maintain a compliance-ready data structure that satisfies FAR and Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) requirements.
- Test unlimited “what if” scenarios, including rate, resource, or pipeline changes.
Scaling delivers insights to your executives that connect project performance to corporate strategy.
Transform Your Planning Process in Three Steps
When your GovCon combines ERP and advanced FP&A capabilities, you elevate planning from tactical project management to enterprise-wide strategic foresight. Here’s the how-to:
- Unify your data.
Align project-level data to your corporate hierarchies. This alignment lets you roll project-level inputs seamlessly into department, division, and organization-wide views without the time-consuming, error-prone manual consolidation that comes with spreadsheets. Your team can shift focus from data cleanup to optimized analysis.
- Apply scenario planning to manage uncertainty.
Indirect rates, pipeline opportunities, and shifting customer priorities can dramatically impact profitability. With FP&A scenario modeling layered onto you ERP system, you can test “what if” assumptions before they impact budgets. Your finance team can simulate potential shifts in funding, staffing, and utilization, all without hours of manual data entry. Your leadership gets a proactive view of the company’s financial health and the flexibility to adapt quickly
This type of foresight has never been more critical, according to both the Clarity and GAUGE reports. They emphasize that GovCon firms are facing shrinking margins and heightened scrutiny under new federal cost-control measures. As funding becomes less predictable, scenario modeling is essential to maintaining resilience and compliance.
- Automate and reuse your forecasting framework.
Stop reinventing the wheel by rebuilding forecasts from scratch for each cycle. Instead, automate plan reuse and version control, carry forward assumptions, and refresh data in real time. This means you can reforecast at the project level as often as needed to keep your corporate outlook current—without manual rework. Automation also creates transparency. Leadership can see, at a glance, how project performance affects companywide results and where to make course corrections.
Nue FP&A Elevates Forecasting into Strategy
When you integrate your ERP with Nue’s advanced FP&A platform, your team moves from reactive spreadsheet-based planning to real-time strategizing with:
- Dashboards that provide real-time key performance indicators, rate impacts, and scenario comparisons.
- Integration of pipeline pricing and project changes into forecasts.
- Multi-year visibility to support strategic planning and board-level discussions.
- Built-in compliance with DCAA requirements for estimating and reporting
As the GAUGE Report concludes, “Operational efficiency is no longer merely an advantage—it’s an existential factor for government contractors.” By harnessing the full capability of your ERP, you equip your organization to respond with agility and foresight, even in a volatile market.
Move Beyond Spreadsheets, From Planning to Performance
Planning doesn’t have to be a bottleneck. When you unify project and budget forecasting, you move from spreadsheets to strategy—reducing rework, accelerating forecasting cycles, and delivering the forward-looking insight your leadership needs to navigate change with confidence.
If you’re ready to explore what ERP + Nue FP&A can do for your organization, let’s talk.
