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Since 1997, Advanced DataTools has worked with several federal
government agencies on the forefront of improving government operations,
and can assist your organization in successfully implementing the
following enhancements to your financial reporting systems:
- Providing the capability for your agency to tie performance
goals to workload measures and accomplishments within one integrated
web-based program.
- Promoting cost-based management by developing a high-performance
financial data warehouse that enables managers to analyze, evaluate,
and report on all aspects of your agency’s finances.
- Integrating budget, performance, and financial information
and making it available to all agency managers in an accurate,
timely, and easily accessible format.
The resulting Integrated Financial and Performance Reporting System,
Apollo, can enable your agency to comply with the Government Performance
Reporting Act (GPRA) and the Budget and Performance Initiative of
the President’s Management Agenda, and save your organization
millions of dollars and thousands of staff hours.
Apollo is comprised of nine distinct types of activities. Two of
these activities – finance and payroll/HR – are typically
handled by legacy or COTS systems. Apollo can interface with these
systems on a nightly basis to link financial data with performance
and workload data, and can maintain strict audit-trail records at
the lowest level of detail to ensure full auditability of all data
in the system.
Apollo includes the following components, and can be enhanced by
including Executive Dashboards
and a GIS component:
- Budgeting
- Performance & Workload Management
- Workforce Plan
- Financial Management Information
- Labor Cost Information
– The Budget Planning
System allows staff at all levels of an agency to define projects
that fit into the themes and priorities of the organization’s
budget strategy, and to roll those projects into a comprehensive
funding plan for all programs and all levels (from HQ to field office).
The plan compiles and tracks multi-year information, and supports
agencies preparation for submission of the budget to the department,
OMB, and Congress.
– The Performance and Workload Management System enables agencies
to set targets at the national, state, and field levels, as appropriate,
to enter actual accomplishments at the lowest organization level
so they are auditable, to roll up and summarize performance and
workload measures as required by the organization, and ties the
workload measures to the financial data for full activity-based
accounting and cost management. It should be noted that in order
to accomplish this, agencies will need to ensure that timesheets
and other obligations are coded to include cost accounting for workload
measures.
– The workforce
plan consists of identifying the staff and skills that will be required
to carry out the performance and workload targets for the given
budget year, and integrating that information with the program budget.
– The Financial Management System is a data warehouse that
pulls GL, organization, fund, program, BOC, and selected other data
fields nightly from FFS/FFIS, and is cross-walked with agency cost,
performance, and workload targets at all organization levels to
enable comparisons of “actual spending with anticipated costs
by program goal” as required by the President’s mandate
for performance budgeting. To ensure auditability of cost data,
load balances are compared each night to the source data prior to
the data warehouse load. If data warehouse load figures do not balance
with the source data, the load is delayed until the problem is identified
and resolved.
– In
order to determine the actual labor cost of projects and to prorate
overhead expenses across all projects, labor detail data is extracted
from the payroll system, including hours reported on individual
personnel timesheets by organization, fund, program, BOC, etc.,
and the cost of those hours is prorated across projects. To maintain
performance and eliminate duplication of data, labor detail data
is typically stored in the financial data warehouse.
With all nine components of Apollo in place, agencies can compile
and manage budgets that reflect their allocations and actual costs.
Within minutes, an agency can use the data recorded to perform any
or all of the following:
- Respond to a Congressional data call regarding a fund
- Report on what funds were appropriated by Congress down to the
field office level
- Identify what funds have been collected from the public
- Report on all expenses to-date by project and program
- Indicate what has been accomplished with those funds, and
- Report on the customer satisfaction ratings.
Agency staff at all levels can view their office’s current
budget status, YTD workload and performance measure accomplishments,
as well as what must be done to meet their goals for the year. If
system access allows (depends on department and agency requirements),
staff can view their performance as it compares to other offices
and identify best practices to investigate and adopt as appropriate.
- Executive dashboards - at-a-glance, interactive views - can be
deployed to significantly simplify the senior staff's access to
the various components of the system, and can be quickly modified
to allow daily tracking of the agency's most current issues and
urgent concerns.
- Agencies can choose to implement a Geographic Information
System component, which uses maps to enable users to drill into
the smallest geographic component stored in the system (county,
congressional district, street, etc.). This would enable decision
makers to very rapidly identify and focus on locations with costs
well inside or outside planned costs, and can drill into the detail
to view a wide range of data (i.e. census, payroll, fees, permits,
crops, grants).
See Successes for more information
on our GPRA solutions in action.
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