Article

Five ways OneStream transforms financial planning for government contractors

Aug. 28, 2025 · Authored by Colt Meraw

Government contracting organizations face financial planning challenges as they navigate compliance requirements, manage intricate project portfolios and strive for operational efficiency in a competitive marketplace. Traditional planning approaches often leave finance teams struggling with disconnected systems, Excel-based project budgets and limited visibility into project-level performance. Corporate performance management platforms like OneStream can transform government contracting operations, consolidate plan inputs, streamline compliance processes and provide the strategic insights necessary for sustainable growth.

Here’s what you need to know:

The challenge of disconnected project planning systems

Government contractors typically rely on project control teams to build estimates-to-complete (ETCs) and estimates-at-completion (EACs) on an ongoing basis. However, these crucial bottoms-up project budget data points often exist in isolation. They might be stored in ERP systems, offline Excel spreadsheets or homegrown tools that do not integrate with performance management platforms. This disconnect creates challenges when trying to align top-down guidance with bottoms-up project budgets, making it difficult for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) functions to validate their enterprise plan against actual work in hand and anticipated opportunities. Even when data is integrated from the ERP or uploaded from Excel templates using Excel add-ins, most of the detail is left behind and only stored offline, significantly limiting reporting, analytics and drill-down capabilities.