Following the government spending cuts it is imperative that public sector finance professionals have the means to gain greater insight into departmental budgets and streamline their budgeting, planning and forecasting processes. Although using Excel spreadsheets typically remains the preferred method for many large organisations, this method lacks any real data control, does not provide real-time financial information and is very cumbersome to manage.
Public sector organisations that replace spreadsheets with a more intelligent budgeting, planning and forecasting system realise immediate benefits. These include reduced budget preparation time, greater financial control, more accurate data and improved decision making.
Improved efficiency
Gloucester City Council has improved its business efficiency by using a budgeting and forecasting system from Advanced Business Solutions (ABS). This system (Collaborative Planning) has helped the council to reduce its budget loading time from ten days to just minutes and to better monitor, evaluate and improve its financial performance by replacing spreadsheets.
The web-based budgeting and forecasting system, which has been tightly integrated into Gloucester City Council’s existing ABS financial management system, enables the creation and real-time monitoring of financial plans and forecasts. Budgetary information can be quickly extracted, consolidated and reported to authorised users, eliminating time-consuming manual processes and the consolidation of spreadsheets.
Integrating prcesses
Local government offices dealing with payments from the public can benefit from software that integrates all front office processes such as payments, correspondence and other daily administrative information into a central database. With a fully integrated business management and accounting software system, these front office activities can work with the same data as back office activities such as despatching, invoicing and accounting.
My.N from Accounting Office is such a system. It is fully integrated to Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel, giving an easy familiarity to users. This allows storage of any incoming or outgoing mail, along with attachments, in the back-office database. Documents may be generated automatically from templates, that can be then logged, stored or retrieved by any staff member as appropriate.
Public sector organisations, however, often use multiple software applications to manage the financial information of a customer. Very often these systems will have little or no integration, and some may be limited in access to just a few users. In some customer facing roles within a local authority, an officer may need to open several screens to form a complete view of the customer.
Light integration
A growing number of authorities are reaping the rewards of a new form of light integration – using SmartPoint (a member of TIS Software group) to leverage the benefits of a unified desktop without the set up complexity. SmartPoint uses Active Intelligence to deliver information to an officer’s desktop without the need to search.
Using SmartPoint, intelligence about the customer is delivered to a sidebar alongside the application most commonly used. The information, drawn from multiple data sources both online and offline, is relevant to the record in view at a precise moment in time. It is additionally relevant to an officer’s specific role, the service being delivered and the data required to deliver the service.
By showing information in this way the officer is presented with a complete view without needing to know where to look for details. Additionally, for the IT team, traditional complex integration is not needed between multiple finance systems from different vendors. Using SQL queries and web service requests to add information to the sidebar, SmartPoint cleverly decouples the data viewed from the original source. By improving access to financial information through system evolution, not revolution, valuable content can be unlocked securely at an extremely low cost that brings savings within weeks.
Value of information
As shown, one of the biggest challenges in public sector organisations today is how to maximise the value of the vast amounts of information captured across databases, departments and projects.
Logix4 (from UNIT4) is a self-service customised data analysis tool developed specifically to enable users of all ability levels to interact visually with key business information. Using simple drag-and-drop actions, users can explore standard metrics, while answering their own ad hoc questions with ease, building up powerful views to answer queries in a simple step-by-step way.
File4 (from UNIT4), a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution powered by Seahorse from CoreFiling, enables UK public sector organisations to convert MS Word-based corporation tax statutory accounts data to the iXBRL format, as required by HM Revenue & Customs (HRMC). File4 is a straightforward, competitively priced solution that will allow organisations to rapidly comply with HRMC’s format requirements, without the need for additional software to be installed.
It is a secure on-demand service which provides predictive intelligent tagging of UK GAAP or IFRS company accounts in MS Word format, converting them into iXBRL. Unlike other tools, File4 is highly intuitive. Conversion to iXBRL is largely automatic, requiring minimal user intervention and no specific knowledge of iXBRL.
Finally, customers of UNIT4’s Agresso Business World solution already have the tools they need to meet the government’s requirements and generate open data in the correct CSV file format on a monthly basis – without external assistance.
Open data
To address the open data requirement further, UNIT4 has developed a utility, Linked4, which will allow customers and non-customers of UNIT4’s suite of products, to have access to their data in a linked format – exceeding the government’s current requirement.
Linked4 enables any public sector organisation to publish data in a linked format via the web allowing it to be cross-referenced and available to search by anyone, in any combination. This provides an advantage by allowing UNIT4 customers to provide more meaningful transparency and will also accelerate the government’s aim of holding public bodies to account, delivering better value for money in public spending and helping cut the record deficit.
For more information
www.basda.org
About BASDA
BASDA, the Business Application Software Developers Association, is a member-driven organisation where members benefit by sharing knowledge and expertise, and working effectively as one voice to address strategic issues and evolving legal, political and technical influences that affect the business software industry.
BASDA galvanises its members to work as an industry, and through its members and their Special Interest Groups (SIGs), BASDA is the acknowledged voice and guardian of the software industry. BASDA is recognised as a stakeholder with governments, including the highest forum within HMRC, where its active partnership achieves common interest goals in harmony.
