DCAA floor-check readiness in 14 days, without the war room

A DCAA floor check sounds like an event. It is actually a sample. An auditor watches a small slice of your timekeeping for one or two days, decides whether what they see matches what your system says, and writes a report. The report follows you for years.

What a floor check actually looks for

Floor checks are not interested in your CLIN burn or your indirect rates. They are interested in labor distribution discipline — whether each employee's recorded hours match the work they're actually doing.

The auditor will pick a handful of employees, observe them, and check four things:

1. Are they at work where the timesheet says they are? Physical presence, on the right project, in the right charge code.
2. Are they recording time daily, not in blocks at week-end? Daily entry is a NIST 800-171 control, not just a DCAA preference.
3. Are revisions to past timecards annotated and approved? A revision without a reason is a finding. A reason without supervisor approval is also a finding.
4. Is the supervisor approval chain real? Auto-approval scripts, generic approver accounts, or rubber-stamp patterns will get flagged.

That's the entire scope. Pass those four questions across a 5-employee sample and you pass the floor check.

The five most common findings

We have seen these five at almost every contractor we've worked with:

Block-recording at week-end. Employees fill in the whole week on Friday afternoon. Even if the data is accurate, the process violates DCAA's daily-entry expectation. Fix: enforce daily entry in the system; lock prior days at midnight.

Unannotated revisions. A timecard line was changed, but there is no note explaining why. Fix: require a free-text reason on every revision; store the reason, the original value, the new value, and the timestamp. Make the field non-optional.

Charge code drift. An employee charged 8 hours to the wrong CLIN because two contracts have similar names. Fix: surface the contract context in the charge-code picker — agency, contract number, period of performance, and CLIN description. Make it impossible to confuse them.

Floor presence vs. timesheet mismatch. The employee is at work, but recording time against a project they are not actually working on today. Fix: floor-check logs that capture observed-vs-recorded by employee, by day, with the reason for any variance.

Supervisor approval theater. Approvals are happening but the supervisor never actually saw the timecard before clicking approve. Fix: enforce a time-on-page minimum before approval is allowed; surface the variance summary the supervisor needs to actually see.

A 14-day checklist

This is the actual sequence we run with KTRNET customers. It works whether you're switching from spreadsheets, Deltek, or Unanet. The point is to be audit-ready in two weeks, not to install software for a year.

Day 1–2: Discovery. Walk through one active contract end-to-end. Map CLINs, LCATs, charge codes, supervisor hierarchy, and approval workflow. 30 minutes per stakeholder, three to five people.

Day 3: Tenant provision. Your tenant goes live with seeded role-based access, the seven role groups, and your contract structure pre-loaded. SSO if you need it.

Day 4–6: Data migration. Existing timecard history loads with original values preserved. Open timecards convert to in-progress entries; closed periods are read-only.

Day 7: First daily-entry day. Employees log in and record time. Daily entry is enforced; supervisors get a lightweight approval queue. The first day always exposes process gaps; document them in writing.

Day 8–10: Floor check rehearsal. Pick five employees yourself. Pretend to be the DCAA auditor. Walk through their timecards, check for revisions and reasons, verify supervisor approvals were real. Fix what you find.

Day 11–12: Supervisor calibration. Sit with each supervisor. Show them what an approval queue looks like, what a variance summary looks like, what they're attesting to when they click approve. Get their sign-off on the process.

Day 13: Stress test. Simulate a revision, a missing approval, and a charge-code change. Confirm the audit trail captures everything. Pull the trail as a CSV and read it.

Day 14: First audit-ready report. Generate the CLIN burn rollup, floor-check log, and timecard revision audit trail. These are the three artifacts a DCAA auditor will request. If they reconcile, you are ready.

What KTRNET does for this workflow

We built KTRNET around DCAA expectations, not around "timesheets." Daily entry is enforced; revisions require annotated reasons; floor-check events log automatically against the contract roster; supervisor approval surfaces the variance summary the supervisor actually needs to see; and the audit trail is append-only and exportable.

If you want to walk through your own contract data in a 30-minute demo, request one here. We pre-seed your tenant with your CLIN structure before the call.