How WiseCost Builds Trust with CPAs to Serve Small GovCon Contractors

Honestly, the frustration was Brian's before it was mine. Brian Wendroff is my partner and a CPA who’s spent more than twenty years doing accounting for government contractors. The way he tells it, before WiseCost they "lived on Excel." To run labor distribution for a client, his team took whatever time-tracking the contractor happened to use (usually not DCAA-compliant), pulled how much each person got paid from ADP or Paychex, and hand-built a spreadsheet allocating every employee's hours across each contract and cost pool. With four employees, it already took a long time. With ten or twenty, one broken formula could throw off the whole thing right before an audit. His clients were small contractors that couldn't justify an enterprise system, so they were stuck. The State Department's YLAI program paired us in 2020, and once I saw that process up close, the question was obvious, why doesn't this exist for QuickBooks, the tool these companies already use every day? So we decided to build it.

What worked was distribution through CPAs. Brian is a CPA who has served government contractors for more than twenty years, and his firm alone works with over sixty of them. When the advisor a contractor already trusts says "you need this to stay compliant," the conversation starts warm, and the objection isn't whether they need it, it's just getting set up. That's our main channel. What flopped was cold email. We tried reaching contractors directly with mailing campaigns, and it went nowhere. This is a niche, high-stakes, compliance-driven purchase; nobody hands over their books and their audit readiness to a tool they found in their inbox. They buy from people they trust. Once we accepted that, we stopped fighting it and leaned all the way into the CPA channel and into education. Our free "DCAA Ready" webinar series, plain-language guides, and help content earn the trust first and let the product prove itself second.

The most common "complaint" isn't about the software; it's that government-contracting compliance is confusing, and people feel it the moment they start. New contractors come to us unsure of what DCAA actually requires, how to set up a chart of accounts, whether QuickBooks is enough on its own, what the SF-1408 pre-award survey is really checking, and how to separate direct from indirect costs without getting it wrong. They're anxious about being audited on something they don't fully understand yet, and that anxiety shows up as questions long before it shows up as product feedback. So we treat education as part of the product, not an afterthought. We run a free webinar series called "DCAA Ready," we publish plain-language guides and a help center, and inside the tool we built a Pre-DCAA mode so a company can start building compliant habits before an auditor ever shows up. We meet people where they are instead of assuming they already speak GovCon.

The biggest thing people get wrong is thinking DCAA compliance requires an expensive ERP. Small contractors hear "you need a DCAA-compliant system" and assume they have to rip out QuickBooks and implement Deltek or Unanet (meaning tens of thousands of dollars and months of setup) they can't spare. They don't. DCAA doesn't bless any particular software. Auditors care about process and evidence, daily time recorded by project, direct and indirect costs separated correctly, labor distributed to the penny, and an immutable audit trail behind every number. Before WiseCost, Brian did all of that by hand in spreadsheets for his clients, and the auditor's problem was never QuickBooks, it was that a spreadsheet can't total or filter cleanly and quietly hides math errors. Add the right layer on top of QuickBooks, and a five-person business can pass the same audit as a big prime. The size of your software bill has nothing to do with whether you're compliant.

The next 6–12 months are about depth. We're optimizing reporting so it's faster and clearer to work with, and we're adding support for QuickBooks Projects, alongside the Classes we already support, so labor and costs map exactly to how contractors already track their work. We're also growing our CPA partner network beyond Wendroff & Associates, CPA, and publishing more education, webinars, guides, and help content to help small contractors get and stay compliant. The goal is simple, make WiseCost the easiest way for small and mid-sized contractors to stay audit-ready without leaving the tools they already know.

I wasn't starting from scratch, but I was new to GovCon. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, I co-founded Impacto Digital, a nonprofit that puts technology to work for human rights, partnering with UN agencies, governments, and companies like Disney and JP Morgan. I also built Mono, a SaaS that automates accounting for small businesses, and I led data science at Acamica, close to a decade in tech overall, with real, hands-on expertise in accounting automation for U.S. clients. What I didn't have was DCAA knowledge; that's Brian's world, built over more than twenty years serving government contractors. He brings the domain, I bring the technology, and WiseCost is what happens when you put those two things in the same room.

If I’m honest, our biggest early misread was thinking we could create demand the way you would with a normal SaaS, push it out, run campaigns, let the product sell itself. In government contracting, that doesn’t work. This is a trust-based purchase, people are handing you their compliance and their audit readiness. What actually moved things was the opposite of a growth hack, sitting with contractors and CPAs, listening to the real problem, and understanding GovCon deeply enough that they trusted us to solve it. The lesson, earn trust first, through education and the advisors they already rely on, and the growth follows.