Single Source Regulations Office
See guidance provided by the SSRO.See our guidance on inflation and our note on applying SSRO guidance to costs affected by COVID-19
Current system status: Live
The statutory requirements for contract and supplier reporting are introduced by the Defence Reform Act 2014 (the Act) and defined in the Single Source Contract Regulations 2014 (the Regulations). The Defence Contract Analysis and Reporting System (DefCARS, the system) is an online, web-enabled system which facilitates submission of statutory reports to the SSRO and MOD.
When preparing reports, contractors must have regard to guidance issued by the SSRO. The SSRO has published three guidance documents: which can be accessed at the links below:
- reporting guidance on contract reports:
- reporting guidance on supplier reports:
- reporting guidance on DefCARS functionality:
There are minor changes to all three reporting guidance documents to further clarify for contractors how to meet their reporting requirements in the 19 October 2023 release. We have reviewed the documents and made the following changes to the contract reporting guidance:
- clarified how to report the due date in the initial reports;
- explained how the total price of the QDC/QSC which is attributable to sub-contracts is calculated in update reports;
- removed references to adding comments in the comments fields when these have been replaced by functionality to attach comments to data fields on every page;
- updated an example provided in paragraph 5.37;
- included guidance on the reporting of cost variances in the higher value Interim Contract Report; and
- removed some guidance no longer considered to be useful to contractors.
In the supplier report guidance, the following changes have been made:
- additional guidance to explain the reporting of revenue on the Revenue Analysis page in the Qualifying Business Unit Cost Analysis Reports (QBUCARs); and
- better explanation of how to report future initiatives also in the QBUCARs.
In the guidance on DefCARS functionality paragraph 2.27 has been amended to explain to contractors how to approve comments and notify the SSRO and the MOD.
The guidance on aggregation principles included in the contract report guidance references notification templates which contractors can use once a QSC assessment has been undertaken. These templates are available on the SSRO Support page of the SSRO website.
DefCARS includes validation checks to help contractors comply with the reporting requirements and reduces the amount of data entry required by eliminating duplication. The SSRO has published a list of all the validation checks which are currently applied within the system and these were last updated on 15 February 2023 .
The SSRO has developed a spreadsheet to enable contractors to report details of pricing amendment(s) separately from other pricing segments. This spreadsheet should be attached to the profit page in an on-demand Contract Pricing Statement when reporting regulation 14 pricing amendment(s) and the re-determined contract price. Examples on how to complete the spreadsheet in different regulation 14 scenarios have been developed to provide assistance to contractors:
Copy and paste functionality is currently available in many parts of DefCARS. To allow contractors with Qualifying Business Units (QBU) to understand their reporting requirements and prepare their QBU Cost Analysis Reports, a copy and paste template is provided: .
Contractors or MOD staff who do not currently have access to DefCARS but wish to understand the Defined Pricing Structure (DPS) cost breakdowns, may access the DPS templates that preceded DefCARS. These previous templates are substantially the same as the current versions within DefCARS.
Under Section 36(3) of the Defence Reform Act, the SSRO must when requested to do so by the Secretary of State for Defence analyse reports provided to it under Section 24 or 25 and provide the results of the analysis to the Secretary of State or an authorised person. The SSRO has published details of example management information products which it supplies to the MOD: