FieldLedger vs Unanet: The Right Alternative for Small Federal Contractors

If you're reading this, you probably got a Unanet quote that made your CFO flinch. Or a renewal notice with a 20% bump. Or a prime contractor told you Unanet is "what everyone uses" and you started pricing it out.

Here is the short version. Unanet is a good product. It is not the right product for a 20-person federal contractor doing $3M in federal revenue. You are paying for modules you will not use for three more years. You are paying per user. You are paying for onboarding that takes longer than your last full contract cycle.

FieldLedger is $149 per month, flat, unlimited users. DCAA-ready cost accounting. No consulting required. No per-seat tax. If you need more than that, you do not need Unanet yet. You need this.

Unanet is built for $20M-plus contractors

Unanet is a comprehensive federal contractor ERP built for firms doing $20M to $200M in federal revenue, with heavy investment in job costing, resource capacity planning, and subcontractor management. For a 15 to 30 person contractor doing $2 to $5M in federal work, Unanet is oversized. You're paying $1,700 to $10,000 per month for modules (job costing, proposal management, resource planning) that you'll use in three to four years, not today. Typical Unanet customer at small contractor scale is spending $24K to $120K annually on features 40% unused.

That is not a jab at Unanet. The product is solid. Mid-market federal contractors run it and do real work in it. Thoma Bravo did not buy a bad company. The problem is fit. If you are a 25-person SDVOSB three contracts deep into your first federal work, you are inside the wrong weight class.

The module stack you are actually paying for

Unanet sells a base platform plus modules. Here is what a small contractor typically gets billed for:

• Timekeeping. Required. Every federal contractor needs this.
• Job costing and project accounting. Useful at scale. At $3M in revenue across four contracts, your PM tracks this in a spreadsheet in 20 minutes a week.
• Proposal management. You are not writing 40 proposals a year. You are writing four.
• Resource planning and capacity management. Useful when you have 80 billable staff across 20 active projects. Not when you have 14 people.
• Portfolio analytics and BI. Pretty dashboards. Not what DCAA audits.
• Procurement and subcontractor management. Relevant if you have layered subs. Most early-stage primes do not.

You are paying for the full stack. You will use a third of it. That is not a feature problem. It is a scoping problem.

Real Unanet cost, with the quiet parts included

The public pricing conversation goes like this: "Starts around $1,700 per month." The actual invoice looks like this:

• Base license: $1,700 per month minimum
• Per-user module fees: $50 to $200 per user per month, depending on which modules
• Onboarding and professional services: $3,000 to $5,000 one-time, sometimes higher
• Annual support and maintenance: usually bundled but re-quoted at renewal
• Custom report builds: billed hourly by their PS team
• Integrations to QuickBooks or your GL: often a custom connector project

Add it up for a 25-person contractor with timekeeping plus job costing plus a basic analytics module. You are at $5,000 per month. Call it $60K a year, plus onboarding. Unanet is Thoma Bravo-backed and has pushed pricing up roughly 20% annually for the past three years. Your year-three cost is not your year-one cost.

What FieldLedger scopes, on purpose

FieldLedger is the cost accounting layer. Nothing more.

• DCAA-compliant timekeeping with daily entry, signed certification, period lockdown, and full audit trail
• Indirect Rate Engine that passes 14 ASBCA edge-case tests and produces defensible provisional and actual rate calculations
• Equipment and materials costing tied to the same audit trail
• Invoicing for cost-reimbursable, T&M, and fixed-price contracts with DCAA-acceptable backup
• QuickBooks Online sync via native OAuth, so your GL stays in QBO where you already run it

That is the product. There is no resource planning module. No proposal pipeline. No BI dashboards with 40 KPIs. If you need those, you need Unanet or Costpoint. If you do not, stop paying for them.

Feature comparison, with nothing hidden

Honest list of what Unanet does that FieldLedger does not:

• Deep project profitability analysis by PM and portfolio
• Resource capacity planning and forecasting
• Subcontractor portal and procurement workflows
• Built-in proposal management and pipeline tracking
• Multi-entity consolidation for holding company structures
• Extensive native report library (300-plus stock reports)
• CAS-covered cost allocation for $7.5M-plus contracts

Honest list of what FieldLedger does that Unanet does not:

• $149 per month flat, forever, unlimited users
• 10-day setup with no required consultant
• Native QuickBooks Online sync (Unanet assumes Vantage or a custom build)
• Modern UI that a field supervisor can use on a phone from a job site
• Transparent pricing published on the site
• No module upsell path, no seat-count renegotiation

If your needs are in the second list, FieldLedger wins on every axis. If your needs are in the first list, you have a different problem, and we will tell you to look at Unanet or Costpoint. We are not trying to be the ERP for a $50M prime.

The cost architecture difference that compounds

The cost architecture differs fundamentally. Unanet charges base license + per-user module fees + onboarding + annual support — all variables that grow. FieldLedger is $149 per month, unlimited users, forever. At a 25-person contractor, Unanet is $200/user/mo; FieldLedger is $6/user/mo. That gap compounds. The "Unanet alternative" for small contractors is not "less Unanet" — it's a purpose-built timekeeping + indirect rate system paired with QuickBooks Online.

Run the three-year math at 25 people:

• Unanet: $5,000 per month x 36 = $180,000, plus $4,000 onboarding = $184,000
• FieldLedger: $149 per month x 36 = $5,364, no onboarding

That is $178,636 over three years. That is a hire. That is two marketing campaigns. That is a proposal win-rate investment. It is not a rounding error.

The growth timeline, start to finish

Here is the path that actually works for a small federal contractor.

Year 1, $500K to $2M federal revenue. You just won your first prime or sub position. You need DCAA-defensible timekeeping and an indirect rate methodology that holds up under incurred cost submission. Start on FieldLedger at $149 per month. Pair it with QuickBooks Online for GL and AP. Total software cost under $250 per month. Setup in 10 days.

Year 2 to 3, $2M to $8M federal revenue. You have 10 to 25 staff. Multiple active contracts. You still do not need resource planning software. You need clean books and clean timekeeping. Still on FieldLedger. Still $149 per month. Savings over Unanet funds a second accountant or a BD hire.

Year 3 to 5, $8M to $20M federal revenue. This is where the decision point actually arrives. If you are running 30-plus projects simultaneously, bidding 15-plus proposals a year, and need formal capacity planning, you start evaluating Unanet or Costpoint. You can layer Unanet in alongside FieldLedger for the modules that matter, or move all-in to full ERP. Either path works.

Year 5-plus, $20M and up. Now Unanet is a reasonable answer. The $60K to $120K annual spend is a fraction of revenue. The modules get used. The professional services team earns their fee. This is the contractor Unanet was built for.

The Unanet growth story is: start small, add modules as you grow. But small contractors often hit a year-3 reckoning: "We've paid $60K in Unanet fees, and we still don't use job costing or portfolio analytics." FieldLedger inverts that: start at $149/month; when you hit $20M in federal revenue and need job costing, you can add Unanet or Costpoint as a specialized layer, or move all-in to full ERP.

Best-of-breed beats big-box at small scale

Big ERPs sell the "one system for everything" pitch. At $30M in revenue that pitch holds up. At $3M it collapses. You do not have the ops team to justify the complexity. You are better off with three purpose-built tools that do one thing well:

• FieldLedger for timekeeping, indirect rates, equipment costing, and federal invoicing
• QuickBooks Online for GL, AP, bank reconciliation, and financial statements
• Kimble or Runn (if you actually need it) for resource planning

Three tools, clean integrations, under $400 per month combined for a 25-person firm. Your accountant already knows QBO. Your PM does not need a week of training. Your field supervisors open an app on a phone and clock in.

When Unanet is the right answer

We will not pretend Unanet is never correct. Here are the situations where we will tell you to buy it:

• You are over $20M in federal revenue and growing fast
• You run 30-plus active contracts simultaneously
• You have layered sub-prime relationships that need a procurement portal
• You are preparing for CAS coverage at $7.5M-plus single contract value
• You have in-house FP&A staff who will actually use portfolio analytics
• You need multi-entity consolidation across a holding company

If any three of those apply, get a Unanet quote. You will use what you buy. For everyone else, do not front-load the cost.

Migration path off Unanet

If you are already on Unanet and bleeding cash on modules you do not use, here is the exit:

1. Export your rate structure. Unanet will give you the provisional and actual rate calculations for the last three years. FieldLedger imports them as a starting point.
2. Export timekeeping history. CSV format. Seven years of history per FAR 52.215-2 retention. FieldLedger loads the full archive.
3. Export contract setup and project codes. Manual rekey on our side is 30 minutes per contract. Worth doing once.
4. Cut over at a pay period boundary. Not mid-period. You want a clean lock on the old system before the first entry on the new one.
5. Keep Unanet read-only for 90 days. Safety net while DCAA-audit-window concerns settle.

Total migration timeline for a 25-person firm: 10 to 14 days. Less than Unanet's original onboarding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Unanet is industry standard. Don't we need it to win federal work?

No. Primes ask for DCAA-compliant cost accounting, not specific software. Deltek, Unanet, PROCAS, or purpose-built like FieldLedger all work. FAR 31.105(d)(3) explicitly prohibits vendors from claiming DCAA approval. The software is a tool. The compliance is yours. If a prime is asking for "Unanet specifically," push back. They are asking for audit-ready cost data. Give them that and they do not care what produced it.

Will we outgrow FieldLedger?

Yes, probably, at $25M to $30M federal revenue. That's five-plus years away for most contractors reading this. Paying $10,000 per month today for tools you'll use in year six is the wrong financial decision. When the day comes, your FieldLedger data exports cleanly to CSV. You carry your rate history, timekeeping archive, and contract setup into whatever ERP you graduate to.

Unanet has X reporting we need. Does FieldLedger have that?

What report, specifically? FieldLedger produces rate letters, labor distribution, equipment usage, ICE Model Schedules (H, I, K, L), incurred cost submissions, provisional billing rate proposals, and DCAA-ready audit exports. If your "required" Unanet report is one of those, we have it. If it is a portfolio analytics dashboard or a resource utilization heat map, you are correct, we do not have that, because your team of 22 does not need it.

What if your system fails during a DCAA audit?

Every entry is soft-deleted, audit-logged, and encrypted at rest. Every record timestamped with IP address and actor. You can export the complete audit trail as CSV at any time. Your data is defensible independent of our uptime. Startvest, the SDVOSB behind FieldLedger, runs federal contracts ourselves. We built the audit trail we would want during our own DCAA review.

Will QuickBooks plus FieldLedger satisfy DCAA?

Yes, for a small contractor. QBO handles GL, AP, and financial statements. FieldLedger handles job cost accumulation, indirect rate calculation, timekeeping, and DCAA-specific outputs. The native OAuth sync between them keeps the books aligned. This is the exact stack we run and the exact stack we recommend for contractors under $10M in federal revenue.

Is FieldLedger really $149 per month with unlimited users?

Yes. Flat. No per-seat tax. No module upsell. No "Professional tier" that unlocks the feature you actually need. Published on the pricing page. The margins work because the product is tightly scoped and we do not have an enterprise sales team to fund.

Trust signals, briefly

• SDVOSB certified March 30, 2026
• Built by federal contractors who have sat through DCAA audits ourselves
• Indirect Rate Engine passes 14 ASBCA edge-case tests
• Flat pricing, published, no hidden tiers
• No required consulting, 10-day setup, 14-day free trial with no credit card

Next steps

You have four ways to move forward:

1. See the structured FieldLedger vs Unanet comparison. At-a-glance table of segment, pricing, deployment, DCAA approach, and integration footprint.
2. Start a 14-day free trial. No credit card. Set up timekeeping, run a test period close, see the rate output. If it does not feel audit-defensible, walk away.
3. See the feature comparison side-by-side. Honest list of what we do and what we do not, against Unanet and Costpoint.
4. Run the three-year TCO calculator. Punch in your headcount and current spend. See what you save.

If your software bill is 40% of your operating budget, the product is wrong for your stage. Fix it.