Spreadsheets are Inadequate

Why Spreadsheets are Inadequate to Track Government Property (GFP), Assets and Inventory

Accounting for Government Property, equipment and inventory that’s been provided to you as a Defense contractor, involves precise record keeping and physical inventory controls to ensure you know what you have and where it is located at all times. Spreadsheets are inadequate and unable to handle the demands of managing Government property without major risks. Risks include significant wasted labor, missing or incomplete records, losing assets and inventory, failing an audit, or jeopardizing your contract.

Here is why spreadsheets fail:

Spreadsheets are not Transactional

When data is entered into a spreadsheet, it only shows the current data and nothing about past data. Having historical asset data can be crucial to passing an audit. 

Maintaining an Audit History of all transactions throughout the lifecycle of an asset, from birth record to disposal, is critical for contract compliance. For example, having the current location of inventory is good — but, knowing where it has been located in the past and who moved it, at what time, provides a much more complete story. Managing historical inventory transactions is important for accurate record keeping. Government contractors need to be able to reliably and consistently manage Government property through the entire life cycle in order to pass DCMA audits. Other transactional data that is important to be recorded includes:

• • Is the asset CAP or GFP? 
  • Is the asset in a serviceable or unserviceable status? 
  • Has the asset been consumed or disposed? 
  • Are there maintenance and calibration schedules? 
  • What is the Shipping status? 
  • Who is the Custodian? 

The list of changing transactional data is long and should be recorded along with all of the other audit history. This is valuable information in the life of an asset and when organizations rely on spreadsheets it is almost always overwritten with new information as the data gets updated.

Spreadsheets Can’t Handle Automated Inventories

Performing a physical count of inventory requires most people to get out of their chair to find assets and inventory. Spreadsheets don’t travel well. Using a tablet or laptop allows you to take a spreadsheet application away from your desk; but, they’re awkward to use, find and update. If spreadsheets are printed, it’s cumbersome and time consuming to find the right physical item that you’re looking for among many pages. 

The biggest shortfall of spreadsheets is that they can’t use Auto ID technology and it’s benefits of speed and accuracy. At minimum, most asset tags today have a barcode that can be scanned and entered into the system automatically. Spreadsheets won’t allow that to occur without significant programming. Beyond barcode, now imagine using RFID for a moment where you can sweep an area with RFID and, in just seconds, capture all inventory in that area. By comparison, manual identification and physical counts would take hours, if not days. Spreadsheets cannot handle RFID.

Spreadsheets are Not Multi User

Only 1 person can be updating a spreadsheet at any time, even if you’ve got the spreadsheet shared on the network. Furthermore, you’ll never have an accurate record of the specific changes that individuals made with timestamps. And attempting to send a spreadsheet out, via email, to other people for them to update and send back is a huge risk of getting the data wrong and then a huge pain in trying to consolidate it back into a single spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets are Error Prone

Spreadsheets often use formatting automatically to drop leading zeros and reformat data within cells. This becomes especially risky when you have multiple people working on a single spreadsheet; because, formatting rows and columns can happen with a simple click even if it’s accidental. That data is changed forever.

It probably doesn’t even need to be said that manually entering data into a spreadsheet is not only time consuming but, well known to introduce errors into your data. Even the best data entry specialists make mistakes.

No Automated Reporting to Other Systems

Government systems cannot handle spreadsheets as a way of reporting asset and inventory data. This means that you’re forced to hand enter everything that you’ve worked so hard to get correct in the first place, only to risk an incorrect hand entry. This also means that a swivel chair approach to government reporting will add hours upon hours to your project.

Current Government systems are designed to take advantage of EDI interfaces — which allows data to be exchanged seamlessly between your computer and the government system. Using a manual data entry process is a very inefficient option that really should only be used for the smallest of contractors. Put simply, manually reporting your asset and inventory data to government systems puts your program at risk for long-term implications.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, your responsibility as a Defense Contractor that manages Government property (GFP) is to use a system that will pass the scrutiny of a Property Management System Analysis (PMSA). In the past 2 or 3 years, these systems have become an essential tool as 1 of the 6 key business systems that will keep your contract obligations fulfilled and a major tool to maintain operational efficiencies when managing, tracking and reporting your government property. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are inadequate and unable to completely fulfill this contract obligation. Contractors should review and assess their Government property management system to ensure that they are in compliance and prepared for an audit.