Financial Management Systems Framework
Financial Management Systems
The CFO Act assigns clear responsibilities for planning, developing, maintaining, and integrating all accounting and financial management systems within an agency. During FY 2007, significant progress was achieved by GSA in developing and implementing its planned “to be” financial systems framework. This framework is designed to fully integrate and streamline all of GSA’s financial system applications in accordance with applicable systems requirements, Federal accounting standards, and other related mandates.
GSA expanded the core accounting system, Pegasys. Pegasys is a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) system solution that integrates several of GSA’s financial accounting applications, processes more than 35 million transactions per year, and complies fully with Federal accounting standards and external financial reporting requirements. Pegasys also holds the most current Financial Systems Integration Office (FSIO) certification concerning its functional design and performance capabilities. In addition to serving as GSA’s current financial accounting system of record, Pegasys currently provides GSA with the functionality to meet requirements to interface with the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) component of the President’s integrated acquisition environment E-Gov initiative, supports the e-Payroll and e-Travel system initiatives, and provides a user friendly HTML format.
Substantial progress was also made in FY 2007 to improve internal controls of GSA financial systems. For the second consecutive year, SAS 70 reviews were completed for both GSA’s Payroll and Pegasys systems and for the first time ever, the review results for both systems were unqualified, meaning that no significant internal control design or implementation exceptions were noted. These reviews provide needed feedback to the client agencies on GSA’s internal accounting and system control in relation to established internal control objectives. The conduct of these reviews helps to ensure that GSA maintains an effective system of internal control and saves GSA’s client agencies and their auditors the additional costs of having to periodically test and review GSA’s financial systems.
Due in part to the effectiveness and efficiency of GSA’s financial management system and its related internal control environment, GSA continues to function as one of four Federal agencies selected by OMB to cross-service other Federal agencies as a Financial Management Line of Business (FMLoB). During FY 2008, GSA will continue with its ongoing efforts to refine its existing financial management system capabilities so that it remains well positioned to service others as a leading and cost-effective service provider of choice for financial management services.
The Financial Management Systems Framework
GSA’s financial management systems framework is currently made up of several systems/applications/tools consisting of NEAR, Pegasys, FMIS, InfoWizard, FedDesk, and PAR. The plan is to either add functionality to these existing systems/applications or migrate/integrate their existing functionality to a new system as follows:
NEAR: The NEAR system originally contained Accounts Receivable/Billing, Asset Management, Cost Allocation, and other functionality. GSA plans to move the Accounts Receivable/Billing functions to a new system solution. The Asset Management and Cost Allocation functions are currently being migrated to GSA's Pegasys system.
Pegasys: The Pegasys system currently serves as GSA's Core Accounting system. In the future this system will handle Core Accounting, Cost Allocation, Asset Accounting, and possibly other functions.
FMIS: Currently FMIS serves as an analytical and reporting tool used to query GSA's Valid Accounting Transactions, and performs detailed and summary financial analysis. FMIS is scheduled to be replaced with a new financial information reporting and analytical capability to provide a data store for financial information.
InfoWizard: InfoWizard was a legacy business modeling and analysis tool that was primarily used by the Public Buildings Service. These functions are being migrated to the planned financial information reporting and analytical capability that is being developed.
FedDesk: FedDesk once served as a portal to access GSA's Travel Management and Reimbursement (Authorization and Vouchers), Labor Data Collection/Distribution, Miscellaneous Reimbursements, and Electronic Time and Attendance functions. The Travel Management and Reimbursement function has been moved to e-Travel, an outsourced, government-wide solution. The remaining functions (Labor Data Collection/Distribution, Miscellaneous Reimbursements, and Electronic Time and Attendance) have been moved to the e-Payroll system.
PAR: This system once handled GSA's Payroll functions. This function has now been migrated to GSA's e-Payroll system.