BAS reporting

The problem

The customer, an influential South African government department, utilises the Basic Accounting System (BAS) to manage its financial transactions. Each divisional business unit has financial managers who use BAS to draw expenditure records, income statements and balance sheets, bank reconciliations and other financial data. These are then used for analysis and control purposes, using budget information also stored in BAS. Forecasts, an important part of financial management, are usually stored in Excel. A summarised view of the BAS data can be obtained using the Vulindlela system.

The combination of BAS and Vulindlela has some shortfalls:

* When a DG requests information from financial managers, it can take up to two weeks to formulate a complete and correct response. This effort severely affects the ordinary day-to-day running of the department's financial affairs.
* On a monthly basis, a manual Excel spreadsheet is compiled from actual expenditure and budget records. This is given to the financial manager, summarising expenditure at the main account level, together with copious printouts from BAS reflecting the supporting transactions. Any verification of the summarised expenditure figures must be done manually. This results in high error levels, inconsistent data and unnecessary effort required for recapture and subsequent verification. As a result, many departments avoid this task.
* Vulindlela provides information that is more up to date than the summary spreadsheet, but it has no drill-down capacity. Any association of transactional data with summary data within Vulindlela must be done manually.
* Certain reports from BAS must be scheduled and are only received the following day. They must be downloaded from the FTP site to Excel. This knowledge is limited to a few people, which can cause delays.
* There is no simple way to compare budgets, forecasts and actuals, which is a fundamental requirement of good financial management.
* Most BAS reports are by financial month, without the ability to summarise by quarter, or by calendar month.

The diagnosis

Youngblood was requested by the department's financial managers to investigate ways of responding to the DGs' requests for information more promptly and efficiently. Youngblood proposed a single analysis facility that would start at the highest level of summary in BAS, and then provide the capacity to drill down through all levels of detail in the sub-accounts, down to the physical transaction. A key component of this facility would be the ability to view actuals against forecasts as well as budgets at the same time, across financial periods or calendar periods. This tool should:

* Be easy to use
* Make it simple to disseminate information across the organisation
* Make use of commonly used infrastructure to minimise extra licence costs
* Be compatible with other commonly used desktop systems

The solution

The BAS Analysis Toolbox is an inexpensive and effective approach to providing financial managers who use BAS with the information they need in a practical and simple way. It provides the following features:

* Access to all BAS information accessed via Microsoft Excel, including
* Actual expenditure
* Disbursements
* Entities
* Budgets
* Forecasts
* Predefined structures that help to produce a coherent understanding of the BAS data, including
* Financial period